THE ORNITHOLOGY OF TENNYSON.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—In the article upon Tennyson's ornithology which appeared in the Spectator of August 18th there occurs the
following sentence :—" To-day Wolfe would scarcely have ventured to introduce his ' Struggling moonbeam's misty light'
in face of the fact that Mr. Nasmyth, with incisive scientific accuracy, informs us on the authority of that unimpeachable witness, the Nautical Almanac, that upon January 16th,
1809, the moon was scarcely a day old and practically invisible" ; upon which it occurs to me to offer the perhaps hypercritical suggestion that the condition of the moon on January 16th, 1809, is not in question in the line quoted, which really has reference to the state of that luminary on the night of December 8th, 1760. The elegy commonly known as "The Burial of Sir John Moore" is not an original composition of the Rev. Mr. Wolfe's, but a very happy and spirited translation from the French of, I think, an unknown writer of lines descriptive of the hasty burial of Colonel de Beaumanoir, killed in the defence of Pondicherry when it was taken by the British under Sir Eyre Coote. In the original the lines that contain the reference to the moon are :— "De minnit c'6tait l'hettre et solitaire et sombre, La lime offrait h peine un d6bile rayon, La lanterne luisait peniblement dans l'ombre, Quand de la baionnette on crensa le gazon."
The whole poem is interesting, and the reproduction by Mr. Wolfe even more so in its accurate following of the original.
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