132 The Poets and Nature. 



Oft in a little squadron seen 

 Of mimic ships all rigg'd complete, 

 Fancy might think the Fairy Queen 

 Was sailing with her elfin fleet. 



With how much beauty is design'd 

 Each channelled bark of purest white ; 

 With orient pearl each cabin lin'd, 

 Varying with ev'ry change of light. 



While with his little slender oars, 

 His silken sail, and tapering mast, 

 The dauntless mariner explores 

 The dangers of the watery waste. 



Prepar'd, should tempests rend the sky, 

 From harm his fragile bark to keep, 

 He furls his sail, his oars lays by, 

 And seeks his safety in the deep. 



Then safe on ocean's shelly bed 

 He hears the storm above him roar, 

 'Mid groves of coral glowing red, 

 Or rocks o'erhung with madrepore." 



In another reference to the nautilus Montgomery repeats 

 the same fancy 



" Should a breath of danger sound, 

 With sails quick furled it dives profound, 

 And far beneath the tempest's path 

 In coral grots defies the foe 

 That never breaks, in heaviest wrath, 

 The Sabbath of the deep below." 



These are, of course, simply perpetuations of Pliny's 

 engaging romance of the nautilus one of the favourite 

 traditions of the classical poets. 



In this class of merely fanciful creatures may be also 

 noticed the Pompilus, the sailor's pilot-fish, which was 

 supposed to guide mariners to their destination, and having 

 seen them safely into harbour, to go back to look for another 

 job, for Apollo, it is said, changed a fisherman (named 

 Pompilus) who had crossed him in his loves, into this fish, 

 and condemned him for all eternity to the task of gratuitous 



