246 The Poets and Nature. 



Wav'd round the coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud 

 Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind, 

 That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung 

 Like night, and darkn'd all the land of Nile." 



And Heber too rises to the theme : 



" The dreadful wand, whose godlike sway 

 Could lure the locust from her airy way, 

 With reptile war assail their proud abodes, 

 And mar the giant pomps of Egypt's gods." 



But I do not know where else in poetry to look for an 

 adequate reference to this terrific phenomenon of the locust, 

 the little insect which the Arabs grind up to make flour for 

 cakes, yet compared with which the devastating armies of 

 man are benevolent agencies. 



Marlowe's little reference to the girl's traps to catch 

 locusts is pretty, and, when we think what the locusts really 

 are, pathetic too : 



" A country virgin keeping of a vine, 

 Who did of hollow bulrushes combine 

 Snares for the stubble-loving grasshopper." 



I have myself followed both army and insect. 



Where the army had passed, the villages were empty 

 shells, the green crops had been cut down lest they should 

 ripen, the melon-fields hacked to bits lest they should bear 

 fruit, the wells befouled with the carcasses of dead beasts. 

 Fire had been there, and the fury of swords. And yet there 

 was greenness left, and, though of a poor sort, gleanings for 

 animals. The injury done was not intolerable ; the land 

 was habitable. 



In the other case there had been neither brand nor 

 blade, and no malevolence. And yet there was nothing 

 left, neither for the camel searching the tops of the mimosas 

 nor for the mule sniffing for herbage between the stones on 

 the ground. The earth was burned close. The bushes 

 were more bare than in mid-winter. The only well we 



