42 The Poets' Beasts. 



gical information are exceptionally muddy on the question 

 oi felts pardus. 



Thomson calls " the lively shining leopard, speckled o'er 



with many a spot," " the beauty of the waste ; " Wordsworth 



has " the lively beauty of the leopard ; " Dryden, " the lady 



of the spotted muff;" Morris has "spotted leopards fair, 



that through the cane-brakes move, unseen as air ; " Moore, 



" such beauties might the lion warm ; " Jean Ingelow has 



" the fair leopard, with her sleek paws laid across her little 



drowsy cubs," and so on : while the other touches of Nature 



— " elegant," " light," '' of easy grace " — all connote a thing 



f of beauty. " Freckled like a pard," says Keats, wishing to 



I enhance the loveliness of the Lamia snake ; and Tennyson 



• has, " eyed like the evening star." 



In Darwin it is the lover — 



" And now a spotted Pard the lover stalks, 

 Plays round her steps and guards her favoured walks. 

 As with white teeth he prints her hand, caressed, 

 And lays his velvet paws upon her breast, 

 O'er his round face her snowy fingers strain 

 The silken knots." 



In Leyden, the " brinded panther fierce " does not matter, 

 but why should Heber, with his Indian experience, say " the 

 brindled pard?" Truly may Herbert, though in another 

 significance, say, " in a leopard the spots are not observed." 

 Campbell, with his characteristic independence in matters of 

 fact, places " panthers " in New South Wales. 

 ' Otherwise they have no place in poets' Nature. Keats 

 has "pard with prying head," a delightful phrase; Hood 

 speaks very happily indeed of a sound "distantly heard, as 

 of some grumbling pard," and Morris, always in sympathy 

 with Nature, has "the stealthy leopard whining" as it creeps 

 from out the thicket. ]5ut except Moore's absurd conceit 

 of leopards mistaking loosened stones for prey, and 



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