194 ^'^<^ Poets Beasts. 



" handed " mole has plenty of room to spare, and though 

 the worms drive their narrow tunnels in subterranean 

 labyrinth, the mole does not complain, for it eats the 

 worms. 



With the poets " the mole that scoops with curious toil 

 his subterranean bed " (Montgomery) ; that *' the crumbled 

 earth in hillocks raises " (Gay) ; " unwearied still roots up 

 many a crumbling hill" (Clare) ; is a "dark grubbing" and 

 " blinking " creature. Cowper typifies Error as a mole, and 

 Dryden has "like a mole busy and blind, works all his 

 folly up and casts it outward to the world's open air." 

 Eliza Cook is good enough to say that " there's a mission, 

 no doubt, for the mole in the dust," and Spenser speaks 

 of the " moldwarp " as a slothful sensualist. Mackay calls 

 all sorts and conditions of men — grasping tyrants, angry 

 bigots, selfish rulers, palace knaves, canting hypocrites, 

 greedy authors, smug philosophers, Malthusians — every- 

 body in fact who tries "to keep the nations down" by 

 plotting against liberty of mind or freedom of conscience, 

 " moles "— 



" Grub, little moles, grub underground, 

 There's sunshine in the sky." 



Keats uses the image finely in the following passage from 

 , "Isabella"— 



" Who hath not loitered in a green churchyard, 

 And let his spirit, like a demon mole, 

 / Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, 



To see skull, coffined bones, and funeral stole ; 

 Pitying each form that hungry Death had marred, 

 And filling it once more with human soul." 



On the other hand, the poets applaud its acute sense of 

 hearing, and deplore its feeble eyesight — 



•' What modes of sight betwixt the wide extreme ! 

 The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam." — Pope. 



