184 The Poets' Beasts. 



have a king, and it is Death. Buddhists, again, aver that 

 the "hare is in the moon as a reward for its self-sacrifice — 

 meeting Buddha hungry the hare cooked herself for his 

 meal, and the Great Master threw her up there to be an 

 object of the world's homage. The Red Indians also have 

 a hare in their moon. 



But its peculiarly sinister reputation has arisen from its 

 own timidity — " the hartlesse hare," the most timorous 

 of animals, suggesting fear and so portending something 

 to be feared. And in this significance the whole world at 

 one time or another has taken divination from "the 

 fearful hare." From north to south, from Lapland to 

 Arabia, from east to west, from the Chinese to the Red 

 Indians, all nations in the past, and many in the present, 

 have seen the hand of fate in the movements of this little 

 creature. 



Its appearance of perpetual alarm specially attracts the 

 poets. It sits "all trembling in its form" and "springs 

 astonished." It is the "list'ning" hare (Bloomfield) ; "in 

 act to spring away" (Thomson); "beneath her bramble 

 screen, quaking as astound" (Heber) ; "afraid to keep or 

 leave her form " (Prior). " To lie and dare, as in a fourme 

 sitteth a weary hare " (Chaucer), is a poetical proverb, and 

 in Herbert's poem, Humility gives "the fearful hare her 

 ears " to Fortitude. The story of the terrified hares being 

 checked in their purpose of suicide by seeing how they had 

 frightened a linnet is versified by Beattie — 



" Is there on earth a wretch, they saki, 

 Whom our approach can strike with dread ? " 



From this notion of perpetual apprehension, due in part 

 to the nervous restlessness of the hare's ears, arose the fancy 

 that the hare slept with one eye open — the sotnnus leporitius. 

 Thus Keats speaks of the hare's "half-sleeping fit," and 

 another poet has the admirable phrase " hare-eyed unrest." 



