Then again, in that lovely lyric in _Paracelsus_, Thus the Mayne glideth, the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river.
Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the water, the swallow flying to Venice--"that stout sea-farer"-- the lark shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid verse records the sight: As the King-bird with ages on his plumes Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.
Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting of insects.

He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day.
He strikes out the grasshopper at a touch-- Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.
He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood: Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.
He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early moths craving their food from God when dawn awakes them, and the fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the edge of tombs.

These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of animal observation and love.

It is a love which animates and populates with life his landscapes.
Many of the points I have attempted here to make are illustrated in _Saul_.

In verse v.