86 The Poets and Natitre. 



While mingling truth with falsehoods, sneers with smiles, 



A thread of candour with a web of wiles ; 



A plain, blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming 



To hide her bloodless heart's soul-hardened scheming ; 



A lip of lies, a face formed to conceal, 



And, without feeling, mock at all who feel." 



So, too, in Cowper's "ancient prude" suggested by 

 Hogarth's picture of morning we have Miss Bridget : 



1 ' Of temper as envenomed as an asp, 

 Censorious, and her every word a wasp," 



the meddlesome, scandal-mongering, reputation-tearing old 

 maid, who is all too familiar in society : 



1 ' Mark how the channels of her yellow blood 

 Ooze to her skin and stagnate there to mud ; 

 Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, 

 Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale 

 For drawn from reptiles only may we trace 

 Congenial colours in that soul or face." 



Fever "like a serpent crawling," "insidious Ague, serpent- 

 like," " Gout half a snake," and other ills that flesh is heir 

 to, share in the serpent reproach ; and both the north and 

 the east wind, that cause so many of them in our chilly 

 latitudes, have "serpents' fangs" and sting. 



The image of the river " stealing like a silver snake," "a 

 glistering snake," that "through the grassy mead, winds on, 

 now hidden, glittering now in light" (Southey), is sufficiently 

 hackneyed, but it suggests to Wordsworth this excellent 

 additional fancy : 



" A mightier river winds from realm to realm, 

 And, like a serpent, shows his glittering back 

 Bespotted with innumerable isles." 



And to Shelley this : 



" The glaciers creep 



Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains 

 Slow rolling on." 



Several other points in the natural economy of the tribe 



