124 The Poets and Nature. 



" Where in the dark sequester 'd pool, 

 Among the fibres of the tree, 

 The curious eye may often see 

 A little crew of silver dace 

 Self-prisoned in that shadowy place." Fader. 



The Dory, " with his dolphin head, whose fins like amber 

 horns are spread " (Joanna Baillie), and whose body bears, 

 so some say, the marks of Peter's fingers. (The disciple had 

 caught it, but the fish cried so plaintively that, " touched 

 with compassion," he picked it up and let it go, saying, 

 " Rejoin thy family and remember me." Others, however, 

 say in that notable passage of the river, when he carried the 

 child-Christ across, St. Christopher caught the John Dory 

 (a sea-water fish, by the way) and left the marks of the pinch 

 which he gave it to be handed down in memoriam to the 

 Dory's posterity. This fish had a certain classical sanctity 

 as being called Zeus, and Aristotle has a "sacred fish," the 

 Anthias, which, from his description of its habits, has been 

 conjectured to be the John Dory. It was also called 

 Faber, " the blacksmith," and so under the protection of 

 Hephaistos, Mulciber, or Vulcan. Again, the Apah, or 

 king-fish, is a native of the eastern seas, and it is not a 

 little singular that, by a people so distant and secluded as 

 the Japanese, this fish (originally included in the genus 

 Zeus) should also be regarded as devoted to the Deity, 

 and the only one that is so. The Apah is by them termed 

 Tai, and is esteemed as the peculiar emblem of happiness, 

 because it is sacred to Jebis or Neptune.) 



"The insinuating eel" (Somerville), "lithe and wavy, in 

 shining volumes rolled" (Pope); the "silver-throated" eels 

 of Keats, " that dread the heron," and " weel-kenned for 

 souple tail and gleds for greed," is, as it deserves, a pro- 

 minent fish in verse, and many rivers strive for supremacy in 

 the produce. Thus Pope has "the Kennet swift, for silver 

 eels renowned;" in Drayton, "nor Annan's silvered eel 



