and bold,’—­good, is it not?  Oh, while it strikes me, good, too, is that ’Swineshead Monk’ ballad!  Only I miss the old chronicler’s touch on the method of concocting the poison:  ’Then stole this Monk into the Garden and under a certain herb found out a Toad, which, squeezing into a cup,’ &c. something to that effect.  I suspect, par parenthese, you have found out by this time my odd liking for ’vermin’—­you once wrote ’your snails’—­and certainly snails are old clients of mine—­but efts!  Horne traced a line to me—­in the rhymes of a ‘’prentice-hand’ I used to look over and correct occasionally—­taxed me (last week) with having altered the wise line ‘Cold as a lizard in a sunny stream’ to ’Cold as a newt hid in a shady brook’—­for ’what do you know about newts?’ he asked of the author—­who thereupon confessed.  But never try and catch a speckled gray lizard when we are in Italy, love, and you see his tail hang out of the chink of a wall, his winter-house—­because the strange tail will snap off, drop from him and stay in your fingers—­and though you afterwards learn that there is more desperation in it and glorious determination to be free, than positive pain (so people say who have no tails to be twisted off)—­and though, moreover, the tail grows again after a sort—­yet ... don’t do it, for it will give you a thrill!  What a fine fellow our English water-eft is; ’Triton paludis Linnaei’—­e come guizza (that you can’t say in another language; cannot preserve the little in-and-out motion along with the straightforwardness!)—­I always loved all those wild creatures God ‘sets up for themselves’ so independently of us, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them; while we run about and against each other with our great cressets and fire-pots.  I once saw a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no doubt; or tomb, perhaps—­’Safe as Oedipus’s grave-place, ’mid Colone’s olives swart’—­(Kiss me, my Siren!)—­Well, it seemed awful to watch that bee—­he seemed so instantly from the teaching of God!  AElian says that ... a frog, does he say?—­some animal, having to swim across the Nile, never fails to provide himself with a bit of reed, which he bites off and holds in his mouth transversely and so puts from shore gallantly ... because when the water-serpent comes swimming to meet him, there is the reed, wider than his serpent’s jaws, and no hopes of a swallow that time—­now fancy the two meeting heads, the frog’s wide eyes and the vexation of the snake!

Now, see! do I deceive you?  Never say I began by letting down my dignity ’that with no middle flight intends to soar above the Aonian Mount’!—­