Beasts of Chase. 207 



its excess in Wordsworth, for instance, and resent it in 

 Cowper ; Tliomson provokes me almost to apoplexy ; and 

 as for Eliza Cook, I weep such tears over her as, I am 

 informed, I wept in childhood over that unfortunate ram 

 which Abraham chanced to sacrifice in the place of his son. 

 There is much pathos in the fate of the ram which had 

 come as a looker-on, and had to take the leading part 

 straight oflF without even a rehearsal. There is much 

 pathos, too, about Eliza Cook's poetry. 



By " sympathy " I mean literally what the word implies ; 

 that is, fellow-feeling ; and nowhere in poetry do I find this 

 beautiful quality so wanting — as compared with prose — as 

 in the poets' treatment of the chase. When they hold with 

 the hare they seem to have no appreciation of the courage 

 and endurance of the riders, horses, or pack ; when they 

 hunt with the hounds they are as pitiless as the dogs them- 

 selves, rush frenzied into the death-worry, and roll in the 

 spilt blood. This loss of balance puzzles me. If a "poet" 

 was of necessity a genius I could understand it But their 

 madness has not always this justification of aUiance. 



Shelley may say anything he likes — he does, as a rule — 

 but I do not object to his spotted tigers or his kingfishers 

 that feed on raspberries. He may make his tigers feed on 

 kingfishers, or his kingfishers on tigers — it would not matter. 

 Nor is there anything that might not be forgiven to a Milton, 

 a Crashawe, or a Keats. I would follow a man all round 

 the parish with my bowie-knife who objected (seriously) to 

 Spenser's statements that boars feed upon camels or that 

 bats are birds. 



For though these great poets are often wrong in facts — 

 and what decently-thinking man does not hate them ? the 

 accomplished fact is a simple brute — they are never deficient 

 in sympathy. Yet they never "gush." Without calling 

 man a monster they can admire and feel with the creatures 

 which for his pleasure or his profit he puts to death. But 



