56 The Poets and Nature. 



fact that the coils, soft as rose leaves, and shot with colours 

 like a dove's breast, can crush the life out of a jaguar in all its 

 rage, and slowly squeeze it into pulp. Watch its breathing ; 

 it is as gentle as a child's. Let danger threaten, however, 

 and lightning is hardly quicker than the dart of those 

 vengeful convolutions. The gleaming length rustles proudly 

 into menace, and instead of the voluptuous lazy thing of a 

 moment ago, the python, with all its terrors complete, erects 

 itself defiantly, thrilling, so it seems, with eager passion in 

 every scale, and tracing on the air with threatening head the 

 circle within which is death." No wonder that the world has 

 always held the serpent in awe, and that nations should have 

 worshipped, and still worship, this emblem of destruction. 

 It is fate itself, inevitable as destiny, deliberate as reason, 

 incomprehensible as Providence. Yet in poetry they figure 

 invariably as the instruments of divine wrath, the objects of 

 popular detestation, the most hateful metamorphoses of 

 humanity, the incarnations of sin. Their graces are deceits, 

 their powers malign. From their very criminality they 

 command reverence as being potential. Even the legends 

 of their beneficence do them no good. They are wise, but 

 only as the bad, as witches, as the devils, are wise. Huma- 

 nity begrudges them even the credit for their lapses into 

 benignity, and hardly forgives them honourable memories. 



"Both gods and heroes alike held victory over the snake 

 as the supreme criterion of valour. They graduated to 

 divinity by slaying serpents. Indra and Vishnu conquer 

 snakes, Hercules has his hydra, St. George his dragon, and 

 Apollo his python. It is over the body of Ladon, terrible 

 progeny of a terrible parentage Typhon the father and 

 Echidna the dam that the hero steps to gather the golden 

 apples ; and across the dread chameleonising coils of Fafnir, 

 that Sigurd reaches out his hand to the treasures of Brunhild 

 on the glistening heath. What more fearful in Oriental myth 

 than Vritna ; the endless thing which the gods overcome ; or 



