Some Poetic Fish-Fancies. 137 



" With their hammocks for coffins the seamen, aghast, 

 Like dead men the dead limbs of their comrades cast 

 Down the deep, which closed on them above and around, 

 And the sharks and the dog-fish their grave-clothes unbound, 

 And were glutted like Jews with this manna rained down 

 From God on their wilderness." Shelley. 



They are " the grim monarchs of insatiate death " (Darwin) ; 

 and " tyrants of the flood," with "quenchless rage;" the 

 "ravin'd salt-sea sharks." That they were supposed to have 

 the snake's power itself a fancy of fascinating with the eye, 

 especially women, and that on some coasts they are believed 

 never to molest children, are superstitions which the poets 

 utilise ; and the use of their teeth for arming the terrible 

 Polynesian cestus, is referred to by, I think, Thomson. The 

 " shark and dog-fish " is a companionship that occurs with 

 some frequency, notably in Shelley, and is not an unnatural 

 one 



" As a shark and dog-fish wait 



Under an Atlantic isle, 

 For the negro ship whose freight 

 Is the theme of their debate, 



Wrinkling their red gills the while." 



That the whale should be a familiar image in poetry is 

 not remarkable, seeing how antiquity, Holy Writ x (as trans- 

 lated), art, heraldry, and fiction generally, have popularised 

 Behemoth. 



" Lo, warm and buoyant in his oily mail, 

 Gambols on seas of ice the unwieldy whale ; 

 Wide waving fins round floating islands urge 

 His bulk gigantic through the troubled surge ; 

 With hideous yawn the flying shoals he seeks, 

 Or clasps with fringe of horn his massy cheeks ; 

 Lifts o'er the tossing wave his nostrils bare, 

 And spouts pellucid columns into air ; 

 The silvery arches catch the setting beams, 

 And transient rainbows tremble o'er the streams." Darwin. 



It is not often, however, that we hear the whale styled 

 1 The word whale does not occur in the Old Testament. P. R. 



