44 The Poets and Nature. 



Watches with red and glistening eye, 

 Prepared, if heedless steps draw nigh, 

 With forked tongue and venomed fang 

 Instant to dart the deadly pang ; 

 But if the intruders turn aside 

 Away his coils unfolded glide, 

 And through the deep savanna wind 

 Some undisturbed retreat to find." 



Many other poets are content to be equally ambiguous, 

 while in some there is a suspicion of the further error that 

 the snake " stings." With its tail ? Marvell starts it, so far as 

 I can gather, with 



" Disarmed of its teeth and sting ; " 

 and after him many follow, as Allan Ramsay in 

 " Th' envenomed tooth or forked sting ; " 



or Eliza Cook in 



"Crushing and stinging with venomed fold." 



Philips continues the fiction with an admirable originality, 

 hardly to be expected from the author of " Cider : " 



" And as a snake, when first the rosy hours 

 Shed vernal sweets o'er ev'ry vale and mead, 

 Rolls tardy from his cell obscure and dank ; 

 But, when by genial rays of summer sun 

 Purg'd of his slough he nimbler threads the brake, 

 Whetting his sting, his crested head he rears, 

 Terrific from each eye retort he shoots 

 Ensanguin'd rays the distant swains admire 

 His various neck and spires bedropp'd with gold." 



The idea of " whetting his sting " is as delightful, but not 

 so original as the rest, for in other poets we have the wild- 

 boar and the rhinoceros whetting their tusks under very 

 similar circumstances. Moreover, there is the high prescrip- 

 tion of Holy Writ : " They have sharpened their tongues 

 like a serpent," says the Psalmist. Southey makes thankful 

 use of it in the lines 



" Wily as the snake 

 That sharps his venomed tooth in every brake." 



