200 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
the wind; fixed, lidless eyes are watching us from 
the brake; everywhere about us_ serpents lie 
matted on the ground. 
If serpents were not so rare, so small, so elusive, 
in our brakes we should no doubt have had other 
poems as good as this about them and the strange 
feelings they wake. As it is, the poet, although he 
has the secret of seeing rightly, is in most cases 
compelled to write (or sing) of something he does 
not know personally. He cannot go to the wilds 
of Guiana for the bush-master, nor to the Far 
East in search of the hamadryad. Even the poor 
little native adder as a rule succeeds in escaping 
his observation. He must go to books for his 
ness. He is dependent on the natural historians, 
serpent or else evolve it out of his inner conscious- 
from Pliny onwards, or to the writer of fairy-tales: 
a Countess d’Aulnoy, for example, or Meredith, 
in The Shaving of Shagpat, or Keats his Lamia, 
an amazing creature, bright and cirque-couchant, 
vermilion-spotted and yellow and green and blue; 
also striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, eyed 
like a peacock, and barred with crimson and full 
of silver moons. Lamia may be beautiful and 
may please the fancy with her many brilliant 
colours, her moons, stars, and what not, and 
she may even move us with a sense of the super- 
natural, but it is not the same kind of feeling 
as that experienced when we see a serpent. That 
comes of the mythical faculty in us, and the poet 
who would reproduce it must himself go to the 
