WILD STAG-HUNTING. 195 



hunt in fairy-land. That it Avas stern and real, the dead deer 

 a few minutes later and the long ride home, only ended by 

 moonlight, proved ; but to this day I have never realized how 

 the death-stroke was given, or that we were all men, hounds, 

 and deer, living and acting in the scene. A strange feeling, such 

 as Kingsley's friend Claude felt at a sight of the herd, when 

 he says he had been "staring stupidly at them, trying in vain 

 to take in the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving 

 and boiling up in my throat ; and at the sound of their hoofs 

 on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring not at them, 

 but at me, who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear 

 in the excitable eyes of mine." 



No doubt you had, Claude. I felt much the same when 

 first that vision beneath the waterfall burst on my sight, 

 or rather when I had time to drink in its full volume of 

 beauty. As I have said, how that deer was killed I know 

 not ; sufficient is it that I saw him dragged to land and 

 "the hounds' fee" distributed. Here was one — nay, two 

 pictures — comprised within the space of ten minutes, such as 

 no artist ever painted, or ever will paint, not even Landseer 

 himself. 



Yet they tell us there is no poetry in sport ! Is there not 1 

 Let him who hath eyes to see and ears to hear, hear. I have 

 seen it advanced, on the authority of Charles Ivingsley, that the 

 poetical side of sport should be ignored, because, he said, 

 " We English owe too much to our field-sports to allow people 

 to talk nonsense about them." True, but did he talk nonsense 

 when, in his " I^orth Devon," owning that he had " never even 

 ridden with these same staghounds," he gives us such a poetical 

 description of a run, as for truthfulness of feeling, as well as fact, . 

 would leave Somerville and Scott both in the shade? ]N'o poetiy 

 in sport ! Why did I, although no poet, thank heaven that I 

 could ride the twenty miles home alone, after the scene I have 

 so vainly endeavoured to describe, and drink in its beauties 

 again and again without interruption ? Why does it come back 



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