8o The Poets and Nature. 



" He who in wild wood alleys roams, unthinking and unwise, 

 And takes a serpent to his heart for beauty of its eyes, 

 For splendour of its arching neck and glitter of its skin, 

 Was scarcely such a dupe as I, in ignorance of sin." 



So Leyden's lines " cherished bosom-sin, Like nestling 

 serpent gnawing the heart within," and "the green-eyed 

 viper gnawing at my heart," or Shelley's 



" Foul and cruel thoughts, which feed 

 Upon the withering life within 

 Like vipers on some poisonous weed." 



This is a curious passage, not only for the last line, which 

 makes snakes vegetarian, but because the simile is so oddly 

 at fault. The only association suggested, it seems to me, 

 is between " withering " in the second line and " weed " in 

 the third, but even that is too weak, while it is hardly sense 

 to say that a thought, feeding on a withering life, resembles 

 a viper eating a poisonous weed. The explanation, probably, 

 is that the poet lapsed from his first image by what the wise 

 call "some process of unconscious cerebration," his mind 

 passing without intermediate expression in words from one 

 to the other, and leaving, therefore, a gap without stepping- 

 stones or bridge. In the first two lines Shelley, it may be, 

 glances at a fiction which has never failed to attract poets, 

 that of the snake living upon the vitals of its parents, as, for 

 example, in Churchill, Dryden, and Marvell : 



" Oh ! my poor country ! Devour' d 

 By vipers, which in thine own entrails bred, 

 Prey on thy life, and .with thy blood are fed, 

 When children us'd their parents to dethrone, 

 And gnaw their way, like vipers, to the crown." 



Against themselves their witnesses will swear, 

 Till,' viper-like, their mother-plot they tear, 

 And suck for nutriment that bloody gore, 

 Which was their principle of life before." 



These vipers have their mother's entrails torn, 

 And would by force a second time be born." 



