146 The Poets Beasts. 



' " Up-piled 



I The cloudy rack slow journeying in tlie west 



I Like herded elephants." 



/ The white elephant — curiously enough a " demoniacal " 

 form of the animal in Vedic myth — meets with only humo- 

 rous reference as a monstrous monstrosity, though the im- 

 mense dignities of this beast from time immemorial should 

 perhaps have invested it with a somewhat mysterious dignity. 

 Morris, however, has " huge elephants, snow-white, with 

 gilded tusks." " The elephant," or " the lord of elephants," 

 is a distinction proudly assumed by many rajahs ; but " the 

 white elephant," or " the lord of the white elephant," only 

 by the premier prince of Hindostan or a sovereign. Then, 

 too, that white elephant of Vedic myth who malignantly 

 hunts the hermits up and down the hills of India, allowing 

 them no leisure for meditation on their travels, who is the 

 mortal enemy of Jatayus the bird-god, the adversary in 

 eternal conflict of the tortoise and afterwards of Garuda, 

 the eagle-deity, but whose ultimate ruin, as already foretold 

 in legend, will be wrought by a sparrow — what a delightful 

 personage he is ! 



Elephant sagacity is of course notorious — 



" The huge elephant, wisest of brutes ! 

 O truly wise, with gentle might endowed 

 Though powerful." 



"Take from the elephant instruction wise," says Cun- 

 ningham ; " the wise and fearless elephant " (Shelley), and 

 so on with many others. Its great age is hardly less widely 

 accepted — 



" As though he drank from Indian floods 

 Life in a renovating stream ; 

 Ages o'er him have come and fled, 

 'Midst generations of the dead 

 liis bulk survives." 



