THE DRAGON FROM THE POND 



OF all the smaller more particular things in nature that have 

 been crystallised in verse or poetry, no event has been more 

 successfully translated into words than the emergence of the 

 dragon-fly. Tennyson delighted always to play the part of 

 the populariser of science. With his short-sighted eyes he 

 peered close into things, and he took pains in books too to 

 find out exactly what happened. Perhaps sometimes he 

 forgot his poetry in his science. Rather unkindly, but in a 

 spirit of admiration, Mr. A. Mackie in a charming article once 

 printed several Tennysonian passages about the dragon-fly 

 alongside a paragraph from a scientific treatise. The differ- 

 ence between the two was little more than a difference of 

 words, though doubtless the word makes all the difference. 



' To-day I saw the dragon-fly 

 Come from the wells where he did lie. 



An inner impulse rent the veil 

 Of his old husk ; from head to tail 

 Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. 



He dried his wings ; like gauze they grew 

 Through crofts and pastures wet with dew 

 A living flash of light he flew. 



So Tennyson. Now Mr. Davis, zoologist : ' Their flight is 



o 



