150 The Poets Beasts. 



Nor does Montgomery hesitate at the giraffe (though he 

 has to make the second syllable short ^). But the very few 

 others who refer to the animal prefer to call it "the camel- 

 opard." Hood has a sportive ode to the "great anti- 

 climax" as he calls the animal, "so very lofty in its front, 

 but so dwindling at the tail ; " but he does not exhaust, or 

 even tap, the potentialities of fun which the giraffe suggests : 

 " For this sky-raking animal, that passes all its life, so to 

 speak, looking out of a fourth-storey window, that looks 

 down into the birds' nests as it browses, and seldom sees the 

 ground except when it lies down on it, is about the best 

 instalment of the impossible that has been vouchsafed 

 to us. "2 



With the camel, one of the most provoking, discontented 

 animals in the world, the poets express a very pleasing 

 sympathy ; and Byron in his phrase, " the patient swiftness 

 of the desert ship," sums up compendiously three of the 

 reasons for the poets' tenderness; while, if we add Thomson's 

 " patient of thirst and toil, son of the desert," we have them 

 all four. Its extreme patience and extraordinary swiftness 

 are two proverbial, and erroneous, attributes of " the bunch- 

 back camel " — as Quarles (adopting Isaiah's epithet) calls it 

 — while the voyaging of the " helmless dromedary " (Byron) 

 over the sandy oceans of the desert and its supposed inde- 

 pendence of wells naturally commend it to poetical fancy. 



But here is the camel to the life, in Jean Ingelow — 



" The Red Sahara in an angry glow 



With amber fogs, across its hollows trailed 

 Long strings of camels, gloomy eyed and slow, 



And women on their necks, from gazers vcikd, 

 And sun-swart guides who toil across the sand 

 To groves of date-trees on the watered land." 



' *' From rude CafTraria where the giraffes browse 



With stately heads among the forest boughs." — West Ittaics. 



2 " Noah's k\V."—Phil Kobinson. 



