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Arnold is not perhaps a profound botanist, but he knows all the plants of his own locality, and knows where to find them. Moreover, he takes pleasure in describing them for himself, with fresh epithets of his own, unborrowed from scientific manuals.

CHAPTER VIII

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S BIRDS

THE exploring of rural districts, waste places, woods, hill-sides and river banks for rare flowers, and the identifying of the specimens there found, do not play a large part in modern botany; but such a pastime gives a pleasure all its own. It is clear from the passages already quoted that Arnold tasted the joy of wandering, Flora in hand, and making the acquaintance of new faces, as well as recognising old friends like the fritillaries and the gentians in their fresh spring garb. With the flowers go the birds, and Arnold was of necessity also a bird lover. His aviary is not extensive, and does not include many birds that find place in poetic effusions. The lark and the linnet are not in it, and his reference to song-birds generally and the sweetness of their music is of the most meagre. He is more concerned with their habits, migration, food, flight, and with tragic incidents in their life.

The swallow is much in evidence in his poetry, as well as the stork and the sea-fowl, and game-birds like the grouse and the partridge. His descriptions, as with those of flowers, are not conventional or trite, but are drawn directly from the object, pictures painted from his own observation. He once or twice mentions the thrush, the cuckoo, and the blackbird, and he has devoted one short poem to Philomela-the nightingale ; "the speckled missel-thrush"; "In the pines the thrush is waking"; "The blackbird picking food ".

The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn,

Is answer'd from the depth of dawn.

When May,

Brought by the west wind, returns

Back to your native heaths,

And the plover is heard on the moors.

Between the waves and black o'erhanging cliffs,
Where in and out the screaming seafowl fly.

The shining seafowl, that with screams.
Bore up from where the bright Atlantic gleams,
Swooping to landward.

On the cliff-side the pigeons

Roost deep on the rocks.

The phenomena of migration have great interest for him, whether drawn from his own observation or gathered from books of travel. Take this

beautiful and feeling picture of the swallows just

prior to their autumnal flight

:

And as the swallows crowd the bulrush beds

Of some clear river, issuing from a lake,
On autumn days, before they cross the sea,

And to each bulrush crest a swallow hangs
Quivering, and others skim the river-streams,

And their quick twittering fills the banks and shores-
So around Hermod swarmed the twittering ghosts.

He knows a swallow from a swift, as we see from his epithet "black-winged" in the line

Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames.
Compare with his swallow-picture this other, of
birds killed in crossing high mountain regions :-
But as a troop of pedlars from Cabool
Cross underneath the Indian Caucasus,

That vast sky-neighbouring mountain of milk-snow;
Crossing so high that, as they mount, they pass
Long flocks of travelling birds dead on the snow,
Choked by the air, and scarce can they themselves
Slake their parch'd throats with sugar'd mulberries.

Or this, of migrating cranes crossing from the
Steppes to Persia :-

As when some grey November morn the files,
In marching order spread, of long-neck'd cranes
Stream over Casbin and the southern slopes
Of Elburz, from the Arabian estuaries,

Or some frore Caspian reed bed, southward bound
For the warm Persian seaboard.

We have already quoted his reference to the fieldfare (or, as he calls it, the fell-fare) and its feeding on the red holly berries. His description grouse is accurate :

of the

The red grouse springing at our sound,
Skims now and then the shining ground.

So of the hawk swooping on a partridge :

As on some partridge in the corn a hawk
That long has tower'd in the airy clouds
Drops like a plummet.

Take, too, that beautiful and pathetic simile of the eagle, portrayed with such minuteness and sympathetic tenderness in Sohrab and Rustum :

As when some hunter in the spring hath found

A breeding eagle sitting on her nest

Upon the craggy isle of a hill-lake,

And pierced her with an arrow as she rose,
And follow'd her to find her where she fell
Far off; anon her mate comes winging back
From hunting, and a great way off descries
His huddling young left sole; at that he checks
His pinion, and with short uneasy sweeps
Circles above his eyry, with loud screams
Chiding his mate back to her nest; but she
Lies dying, with the arrow in her side,
In some far stony gorge out of his ken,
A heap of fluttering feathers ;- -never more
Shall the lake glass her, flying over it;
Never the black and dripping precipices
Echo her stormy scream as she sails by.

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