1 5 '5 The Poets Beasts. 



His arms robust the hardy hunter flung, 

 And rolled the panting monster on the ground. 

 Crushed, with enormous strength, his bony skull ; 

 And courtiers hailed the man who turned the bull." 



But, as a rule, it is the American bison of which the 

 poets treat — not the reem,^ the extinct Urus, of which the 

 Bible speaks, and which (according to legend) had to be 

 towed behind the Ark, as its horns would not allow it to 

 get in by the door. Asks Young in his paraphrase — 



" Will the tall reem which knows no lord but me 

 Low at the crib and ask an alms of thee ? 

 Submit his unworn shoulder to the yoke, 

 Break the stiff clod, and o'er thy farrow smoke? " 



Not the magnificent gaur of Asia, that the natives say 

 takes up stones with its nostrils and discharges them at 

 its assailants with the force of a musketball ! — nor the 

 great Arna of the wondrous horns that ramps at large in the 

 swampy jheels of Bhutan, charges the elephant whenever 

 it meets it, and lords it over the dense marshy thickets 

 bristling with canes and wild rose, nor its African congener 

 of equally terrible armament, but the animal that the Red 

 Indian knows so well, and with which his whole life was 

 at one time bound up : the bison that has been called 

 the true pioneer of Western America, and, once " spread 

 o'er the vast savannah, ranged masterless" is now being 

 fast exterminated by the amazing progress of the New 

 World— 



" In these plains 



The bison feeds no more. Twice twenty leagues 



Beyond remotest smoke of hunters' camp, 



Roams the majesiic brute in herds that siiake 



The earth." 



But the bison is an animal of extraordinary picturesque- 



 Mentioned by Drayton and Young. 



