en the southern and the western Horn,
Heard neither'--

We pause for a moment to consider what a sea-captain might have expected
to hear, by night, in the Atlantic ocean--he heard

--'neither the warbling of the _nightingale_
Nor melody o' the Libyan lotusflute,'

but he did hear the three daughters of Hesper singing the following
song:--

'The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit,
Guard it well, guard it warily,
Singing airily,
Standing about the charmed root,
Round about all is mute'--

_mute_, though they sung so loud as to be heard some leagues out at
sea--

----'all is mute
As the snow-field on mountain peaks,
As the sand-field at the mountain foot.
Crocodiles in briny creeks
Sleep, and stir not: all is mute.'

How admirably do these lines describe the peculiarities of this charmed
neighbourhood--fields of snow, so talkative when they happen to lie at
the foot of the mountain, are quite out of breath when they get to the
top, and the sand, so noisy on the summit of a hill, is dumb at its
foot. The very crocodiles, too, are _mute_--not dumb but _mute_. The
'red-combed dragon curl'd' is next introduced--

'Look to him, father, lest he wink, and the golden apple be stolen
away,
For his ancient heart is drunk with overwatchings night and day,
Sing away, sing aloud evermore, in the wind, without stop.'

The north wind, it appears, has by this time awaked again--

'Lest his scaled eyelid drop,
For he is older than the world'--

older than the _hills_, besides not rhyming to 'curl'd,' would hardly
have been a sufficiently venerable phrase for this most harmonious of
lyrics. It proceeds--

'If ye sing not, if ye make false measure,
We shall lose eternal pleasure,
Worth eternal want of rest.
Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure
Of the wisdom of the west.
In _a corner_ wisdom whispers. Five and three
(_Let it not be preached abroad_) make an awful mystery.'--p. 102.

This recipe for keeping a secret, by singing it so loud as to be heard
for miles, is almost the only point, in all Mr. Tennyson's poems, in
which we can trace the remotest approach to anything like what other men
have written, but it certainly does remind us of the 'chorus of
conspirators' in the Rovers.

Hanno, however, who understood no language but Punic--(the Hesperides
sang, we presume, either in Greek or in E