2O4 The Poets and Nature. 



" Hence, you long-legged spinners, hence ! " Yet Puck 

 swings on their threads, " hung between two branches of a 

 briar," the fairies' lutes are strung with gossamer; their 

 steeds reined with "smallest spiders' web," and Titania's 

 " waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs." 



" Then the Interpreter showed them into the very best 

 room of the house, a very bare room it was, so he bid them 

 look round about, and see if they could find anything 

 profitable there. Then they looked round and round for 

 there was nothing to be seen but a very great spider on the 

 wall and that they overlooked. 



"Mercy. Then said Mercy, Sir, I see nothing. 



" But Christiana held her peace. 



"Interpreter. But, said the Interpreter, look again. 



" She, therefore, looked again, and said, Here is not any- 

 thing but an ugly spider, who hangs by her hands upon the 

 wall. 



"Then said he, Is there but one spider in all this spacious 

 room? 



" Then the water stood in Christiana's eyes, for she was a 

 woman of quick apprehension ; and she said, Yea, Lord, 

 there are more here than one. Yea, and spiders whose 

 venom is far more destructive than that which is in here." 



This is a delightful passage, spoilt, perhaps, to some by 

 the fact that the translators of the Bible ought probably to 

 have said lizards instead of spiders, and that the " semam " 

 of the original is still an undetermined quantity. Not that 

 such a detail disturbs the poets. For them this insect is of 

 one species only and without varieties. It is " the spider " 

 that spins web "out of her own bowels." And yet how 

 prodigious, far-reaching, and deep-searching in its influences 

 on the economy of insect life is this many-tribed insect. 



Who has not at one time or another thought the lives of 



