200 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



the wind ; fixed, lidless eyes are watching us from 

 the brake ; everywhere about us serpents lie 

 matted on the ground. 



If serpents were not so rare, so small, so elusive, 

 in our brakes we should no doubt have had other 

 poems as good as this about them and the strange 

 feelings they wake. As it is, the poet, although he 

 has the secret of seeing rightly, is in most cases 

 compelled to write (or sing) of something he does 

 not know personally. He cannot go to the wilds 

 of Guiana for the bush-master, nor to the Far 

 East in search of the hamadryad. Even the poor 

 little native adder as a rule succeeds in escaping 

 his observation. He must go to books for his 

 serpent or else evolve it out of his inner conscious- 

 ness. He is dependent on the natural historians, 

 from Pliny onwards, or to the writer of fairy-tales : 

 a Countess d'Aulnoy, for example, or Meredith, 

 in The Shaving of Shagpat, or Keats his Lamia, 

 an amazing creature, bright and cirque- couchant, 

 vermilion-spotted and yellow and green and blue ; 

 also striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, eyed 

 like a peacock, and barred with crimson and full 

 of silver moons. Lamia may be beautiful and 

 may please the fancy with her many brilliant 

 colours, her moons, stars, and what not, and 

 she may even move us with a sense of the super- 

 natural, but it is not the same kind of feeling 

 as that experienced when we see a serpent. That 

 comes of the mythical faculty in us, and the poet 

 who would reproduce it must himself go to the 



