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profusion of botanic references, but they are enough to indicate what a genuinely sound botanist he is, and how he is able to bend the hard facts of science to the softer uses of poetry. How much charm is thereby added to his poems only those can fully understand who are themselves more or less versed in the study of plant life. He is always accurate, always pat, always fresh and suggestive; moreover, he has the artist's power of selecting skilfully, and never wearies us with too much. He does not empty his wallet, he merely chooses a few typical striking cases, the rest being thrown aside. The same qualities will be discernible when we deal with him as a zoologist and geologist.

CHAPTER II

TENNYSON AS ENTOMOLOGIST

We have seen how closely Tennyson applies his observation to every phase of plant life-bud, leaf, flower and fruit and how he knows not merely the commonplaces but recondite facts which only the student of botany is familiar with. As a last example we may cite from The Ring

I am not surely one of those

Caught by the flower that closes on the fly;

which proves that he is not unacquainted with insectivorous plants like the sun-dew (Drosera), the Venus fly-trap (Dionaea) and the butterwort (Pinguicula), and can turn them to his own purposes. It remains to indicate how he is equally at home among lower animal forms and insects, and especially birds. He would seem to have set himself to amass new material for his art by delving deep down into strata of knowledge hitherto not systematically explored by the poetic

mind, and there is no doubt this endeavour showed his wisdom, since it gave to his work an individuality which it would not otherwise have possessed. Wordsworth had a conception of Nature quite apart and distinct a much more deep and penetratingly spiritual notion amounting to a religious cult. This gives him his individuality, but it was no part of Wordsworth's plan to be a scientific expert. He would have disdained to pay heed to such advice, had it been tendered to him; moreover, science had not made the strides in his early days that it made during Tennyson's maturing years. Tennyson, not being endowed with Wordsworth's spiritual insight, had recourse to scientific study, which not only increased his range of selection, but opened his eyes to many phenomena which, but for this systematic discipline, would have remained a closed book to him. Science outspread her myriad horns of plenty at his feet. He began by feeling the charms of " the fairy tales of science" and his eye grew to be well practised in Nature. In Amphion he jocularly refers to the modern muses reading botanical treatises. It is beyond doubt that he was not above dipping into such treatises himself, but he made their facts his own. Becket, he is "still a lover of the beast and bird".

Like

Many a schoolboy is a collector of Lepidoptera and has reared caterpillars through cocoon and chrysalis, to moth and butterfly. This metamorphosis is so striking that we do not marvel to find it woven into poetry, but nowhere has such felicitous use been made of it as in Tennyson's pages. His finest picture in this connection is undoubtedly that of the dragon-fly in The Two Voices.

To-day I saw the dragon-fly

Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil

Of his old husk: from head to tail

Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings; like gauze they grew ;
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.

Could anything be finer, more pictorial, or more accurate? Turn to a treatise on zoology and you will find every particular corroborated: "Their flight is exceedingly rapid, making them the swallows of the insect world. The eggs are laid in water. The full-grown larva climbs up the stem of some plant till it is above water, when its skin splits longitudinally along the dorsal surface and the adult dragon-fly gradually works its way out. Its wings are at first flabby and shrivelled. They

soon expand and assume their proper form" (The Natural History of Animals, Davis). The poet has caught all the essential features, and who is there but prefers his vivid description to the tamer and more sober language of the scientist?

Other insect references, though on a less elaborate scale than the one just quoted, are common enough. Geraint galloped up

glancing like a dragon-fly

In summer suit and silks of holiday.

And in The Lover's Tale,

the dragon-fly

Shot past me like a flash of purple fire.

Sir Gareth, when he threw aside his dark cloak, appeared in full armour,

and flashed as those

Dull coated things that, making slide apart

Their dusk wing cases, all beneath them burns
A jewelled harness ere they pass and fly.

In The Princess the suggestion is made that women, aping the academic costume of men, should not wear our rusty gowns,

But move as rich as emperor moths.

The three youths, when they paid their visit to Princess Ida's college and donned their college gowns, were

As rich as moths from dusk cocoons.

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