My Literary Zoo

MY LITERARY ZOO.

1

EVERYBODY’S PETS.

The world’s not seen him yet,

Who has not loved a pet.

Not the human pets of noted persons, such as Walter Scott’s Pet Marjorie, that winsome, precocious little witch, so loved by the “Wizard of the North,” or Bettina von Arnim, the eccentric, brilliant girl, whose rhapsodic idolatry was placidly encouraged by the great Goethe, but the dumb favourites of distinguished men and women.

I must devote a few pages to the various tributes to insects, birds, and animals, written about with love, pity, or admiration, yet not as pets, as Burns’s address to the Mousie:

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

2

And justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor earth-born companion

And fellow-mortal;

and another to an unspeakable insect that rhymes with mouse. We remember, too, his essay on Inhuman Man, as he saw a wounded hare limp by. The fly has often been honoured in prose or verse, but we all like best the benevolent speech of dear Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy to the overgrown bluebottle, which had buzzed about his nose and tormented him cruelly during dinner, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last. “I’ll not hurt thee,” said Uncle Toby; “I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head. Go,” said he, lifting up the window—“go, poor devil, get thee gone. Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Tristram adds, “The lesson then imprinted has never since been an hour out of mind, and I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.”

The Greek grasshopper must have 

3

been a wonderful creature, a sacred object, and spoken of as a charming songster. When Socrates and Phædrus came to the fountain shaded by the palm tree, where they had their famous discourse, Socrates spoke of “the choir of grasshoppers.”

Another makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:

Me, the Nymphs’ wayside minstrel, whose sweet note

O’er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float.

Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string on his lyre and “filled the cadence due.”

This Pindaric grasshopper seems quite unlike the ravaging locust of the West. Burroughs suggests that he should be brought to our country, as some one is trying to introduce the English lark.

Emerson devotes a poem to the burly dozing bumblebee, a genuine optimist:

Wiser far than human seer,

Yellow-breeched philosopher;

Seeing only what is fair,

Sipping only what is sweet.