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 hfe, 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 literatiure, 

 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 

 perhaps he charms all the better for it, and it is 

 certainly not a lamentable thing, since it detracts 



