7 2 The Poets and Nature. 



Nor are the serpent-reverences of contemporary cult for- 

 gotten, the snake-gods of India, where, as Sir W. Jones 

 sings 



" Taraka, with snaky legions, 

 Envious of supernal powers, 

 Menaces old Meru's golden head, 

 And Indra's beamy regions, 

 With desolation wild bespread." 



Foremost of these is Anantas, "the king of serpents, 

 with his thousand heads," the infinite 



"That serpent old, 



Which clasped the great world in its fold, 

 And brooded over earth and the charmed sea 

 Like endless, restless, drear Eternity ; " 



and next Shesh, " whose diamond sun makes subterranean 

 day." The poet refers here without a doubt to that fine 

 legend of the Indian aborigines the Nagas, or " snake-men," 

 who say that once upon a time, and perhaps they are right, 

 they possessed the land, but were driven into the hill-fast- 

 nesses which they now inhabit by successive waves of 

 invasion, and that their great captain and divinity Shesh, 

 "the king of serpents" fled underground, and in con- 

 tempt of the sunlight from which he had been exiled, 

 created the Kanthi-stone, more brilliant than a whole rock 

 of diamond, by the light of which he keeps the diary 

 of the earth, and solemnly records the procession of the 

 ages. 1 



This Shesh, "that never dies," and "whose hiss the round 



1 The Cherokee Indians of the West have much the same legend as the 

 Nagas of the East, and Mrs. Hemans refers to 



" The mighty serpent king 

 Midst the grey rocks, his old domain," 



who is supposed to dwell in the central recesses of the mountains, the chief 

 of the rattlesnakes, and who, though subterranean, is honoured as the 

 "light-giver." P. R. 



