THE SERPENT IN LITERATURE 197 
Therefore they did not end their days 
In sight of blood; but were rapt, far away, 
To where the west wind plays, 
And murmurs of the Adriatic come 
To those untrodden mountain lawns; and there 
Placed safely in changed forms, the pair 
Wholly forget their first sad life, and home, 
And all that Theban woe, and stray 
Forever through the glens, placid and dumb. 
How the immemorial fable—the vain and faded 
imaginings of thousands of years ago—is freshened 
into life by the poet’s genius, and the heart stirred 
as by a drama of the day we live in! But here we 
are concerned with the serpentine nature rather 
than with the human tragedy, and to those who 
are familiar with the serpent, and have been pro- 
foundly impressed by it, there is a rare beauty 
and truth in that picture of its breathless quiet, its 
endless placid dumb existence amid the flowery 
brakes. 
But the first and chief quality of the snake— 
the sensation it excites in us—is its snakiness, our 
best word for a feeling compounded of many 
elements, not readily analysable, which has in it 
something of fear and something of the sense of 
mystery. I doubt if there exists in our literature, 
verse or prose, anything that revives this feeling 
so strongly as Dr. Gordon Hake’s ballad of the 
dying serpent-charmer. “The snake-charmer is a 
bad naturalist,” says Sir Joseph Fayrer, himself a 
prince among ophiologists; it may be so, and 
prehaps he charms all the better for it, and it is 
certainly not a lamentable thing, since it detracts 
