1 70 The Poets and Natiire. 



sufficient allowance for the license of poets. I had hoped 

 that I had avoided these objections. However, two volumes 

 of these trivial studies of the poets' natural history have been 

 published, and nearly every chapter in each volume will be 

 found to contain a well-founded complaint of the poets' 

 neglect of some central fact of nature's teaching. 



I am speaking, as I have always spoken, of the ante- 

 Tennysonian epoch. Our latest Poet Laureate was one of 

 the most accurately-scientific naturalists of the day, and how 

 exquisite he is in his fidelity to fact I need not repeat. 



For example, in my " Bird " volume, the poets cannot 

 say too much about nightingales ; yet nearly every one of 

 them speaks of the glorious songster, not the allegorical 

 Philomela, but the actual living bird before them, as female 

 and as English peculiarly, specially, English. 



Or, for example, in the " Beast " volume : the fox is treated 

 universally as a monster of cruelty, and, therefore, properly 

 punished by being torn to pieces by hounds. 



These are, each in its way, typical errors. The first makes 

 nonsense and an absurdity out of one of Nature's prettiest 

 and most powerful parables. The second presents the poets 

 in a thoroughly unsympathetic and Philistine aspect. 



This my third volume will be found to illustrate incidentally 

 the same unnecessary and unpoetical blemishes indeed, I 

 need go no further for evidence of this than the present mole- 

 hill-building ant. Why, I would ask, should any writers go 

 out of their way to insist on ants making mole-hills ? Why 

 not let them make ant-hills ? Such conceits may be " trivial," 

 but when they occur in every poem the total is certainly not 

 trivial. Error becomes then characteristic. Moreover, the 

 inaccuracies are, as a rule, useless ones, and diminish the 

 actual beauty of the verses in which they occur. 



Tennyson is invariably correct, and what can be more 

 beautiful than his similes, analogies, and metaphors taken 

 from real life ? 



