132 FISHING GOSSIP. 
diate operations, will not recall, and feel better for the 
recollection, the words of Horatio to Bernardo, as the 
night waned away before the castle of Elsinore, and 
which so well describe the picture before him :— 
“But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, 
Walks o’er the dew of yond high eastern hill !” 
In the heart-awakening light of these lines, reflecting 
with so much truth and simplicity the beauty of the 
hour and the scene, the spear brightens into refine- 
ment, and the lake below, sleeping in luminous 
vapour, half-mist half-sunshine, ceases to be the mere 
hunting-ground of the savage. Thus viewing the 
prospect and his own relation to it through the be- 
nign teachings of the poet, the spectator feels that 
barbarism and such an interpreter of nature can no 
longer co-exist. Touched by the beams of the morn- 
ing sun, and warmed into new life by the inspirations 
of poetry, the youth with his spear on the shore be- 
comes a symbol of the civilisation of man. 
But there must be more than poetry, the pic- 
turesque, and their genial influences present, to con- 
stitute a good day for sun-spearing. An absolute 
calm and a cloudless sky must lend their aid to the 
undertaking. If the leaves of the aspen (Populus as 
tremula), of which we are told, incorrectly, I hope, 
“woemen’s tongues are made ;” or the purple spike- 
lets of the quaking grass (Briza media), from which ~ 
we brush the dew as we descend to the lake, show 
