Botanists as Poets Botanists are sometimes very bad poets—witness the
lamentable verses written ad hoc for the else delightful Anne Pratt—but Lord de Tabley (who became a leading authority on the endless varieties or species of the blackberry) always sees his flowers and birds in a wider reference: " The sedge-wren tells her note,
Dun larks in ether float, The uprolled clouds sustain their pageant dome, In velvet, sunshine 'lea Spires up the bulrush head, Where rock the wild swans in their reedy home."
In that poem, too, " Auguries of May," the mere, a peculiar favourite of several species of swan, leaps to the eye. It is a pity that Mrs. Gaskell, who made the fame of at least one Tennysonian phrase, " more black than ashbuds in the front of March " had not the freedom of Lord de Tabley's collected poems. Incidentally, " the front of March" comes straight from Shakespeare
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