86 
NATURE NOTES. 
enabled him to give us, Keats presents this lovely sketch of 
goldfinches : — 
“ Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop 
From lowhung branches ; little space they stop ; 
But sip, and twitter, and their feathers sleek ; 
Then off at once, as in a wanton freak ; 
Or perhaps, to show their black and golden wings, 
Pausing upon their yellow flutterings.” 
In the same poem he gives us this pretty sketch of 
minnows : — 
“ Where swarms of minnows show their little heads 
Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, 
To taste the luxury of sunny beams 
Tempered with coolness. How they ever wrestle 
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle 
Their silver bodies on the pebbly sand. 
If you but scantily hold out the hand. 
That very instant not one will remain ; 
But turn your eye, and there they are again.” 
Though Tennyson is' admirable in depicting bird-life, he is 
more admirable still as a painter of fish, in which few poets have 
surpassed this lovely simile in “ Enid ” : — 
“ Like a shoal 
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn 
Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot, 
Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand ; 
But if a man who stands upon the brink. 
But lift a shining hand against the sun, 
There is not left the twinkle of a fin 
Between the cressy islets white in flower.” 
The great laureate of the winds is Shelley ; but as a Nature- 
painter of winds on the sea, few of our poets can surpass 
Tennyson, whose power is well displayed in this passage from 
“ Elaine” : — 
“ As a wild wave in the wide North-sea, 
Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears with all 
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, 
Down on a bark, and overbears the bark. 
And him that helms it.” 
To that may be added this passage of waves breaking on a 
table-shore : — 
“ As the crest of some slow-arching wave. 
Heard in dead night along that table-shore 
Drops flat, and after the great waters break 
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, 
P'rom less and less to nothing.” 
We observe that he does not indulge in the usual generalities 
about emerald green billows, dark blue sea and the like, but 
writes his descriptions as true as those of a naturalist. His 
adjectives of colour are never used, in the ordinary way, for mere 
