ton, Wall, and Vincent Richards have certainly brought us somewhat more plainly to understand that which happens. What gain is there for man? As yet there is little, except that, while a few years ago we were merely groping for remedies, to-day we are in a position to know with some definiteness what we want and what we do not want.

Let us see what the actual present gain is. If we mix any venom with a strong enough solution of potassa or soda we destroy its power to kill. A solution of iodine or perchloride of iron has a like, but a lesser capacity, and so also has bromohydric acid; but by far the best of all, as was first shown by Lacerda, is permanganate of potash. If this agent be injected at once or soon through a hollow needle into the fang wound, wherever it touches the venom it destroys it. It also acts in like destructive fashion on the tissues; but, relatively speaking, this is a small matter. If at once we can cut off the circulation by a ligature and thus delay absorption and then use permanganate freely, we certainly lessen the chances of death; yet, as the bites occur usually when men are far from such help, it is but too often a futile aid, although it has certainly saved many lives. The first effect of venom is to lessen suddenly the pressure under which the blood is kept while in the vessels. Death from this cause must be rare, as it is active for so short a time. Any alcoholic stimulus would at this period be useful; but, despite the popular creed, it is now pretty sure that many men have been killed by the alcohol given to relieve them from the effects of snake bite, and it is a matter of record that men dead drunk with whisky and then bitten have died of the bite. For the consequences to the blood and to the nerve centers which follow an injection of venom there is, so far as I am aware, no antidote; but as to this I do not at all despair, and see clearly that our way to find relief is not by stupid trials of this sort and that, but by competently learning what we have to do. Moreover, we are in a position at present to say what not to do, and there is a large measure of gain in being able to dismiss to the limbo of the useless a host of so-called antidotes.

Venom is an albuminous complex substance,

and although in its effects so unlike the albumens which make our tissues and circulate in the blood, it is yet so like these in composition that whatever alters it destructively is pretty sure to affect them in like fashion. Hence the agents which do good locally at some cost to the tissues are worse than valueless when sent after the venom into the circulating blood. Yet, possibly, we may hope to find remedies which will stimulate and excite the vital organs which venom enfeebles. In this direction lie our hopes of further help. Anything which delays the fatal effect of the poison is also a vast advantage in treatment, because there are agencies at work which seem to be active in renewing the blood and repairing the damage done to the tissues, so that recoveries are sometimes remarkably abrupt. It is possible that free bleeding followed by transfusion of healthy blood may prove efficient.

I am often asked what I would do if bitten while far from help. If the wound be at the tip of a finger, I should like to get rid of the part by some such prompt auto-surgical means as a knife or a possible hot iron affords. Failing these, or while seeking help, it is wise to quarantine the poison by two ligatures drawn tight enough to stop all circulation. The heart weakness is made worse by emotion, and at this time a man may need stimulus to enable him to walk home. As soon as possible some one should thoroughly infiltrate the seat of the bite with permanganate or other of the agents above mentioned. By working and kneading the tissues the venom and the antidote may be made to come into contact, and the former be so far destroyed. At this time it becomes needful to relax the ligatures to escape gangrene. This relaxation of course lets some venom into the blood-round, but in a few moments it is possible again to tighten the ligatures, and again to inject the local antidote. If the dose of venom be large and the distance from help great, except the knife or cautery little is to be done that is of value. But it is well to bear in mind that in this country a bite in the extremities rarely causes death. I have known of nine dogs having been bitten by as many snakes and of these dogs but two died. In India there would have been probably nine dead dogs.

S. Weir Mitchell.

T is safe to say that there is no other book which has had so great an influence upon the literature of the world as the Bible. And it is almost as safe-at least with no greater danger than that of starting an instructive discussion to say that there is no other literature which has felt this influence so deeply or shown it so clearly as the English. The cause of this latter fact is not far to seek. It may be, as a discontented French critic suggests, that it is partly due to the inborn and incorrigible tendency of the AngloSaxon mind to drag religion and morality into everything. But certainly this tendency would never have taken such a distinctly biblical form had it not been for the beauty and vigor of our common English version of the Scriptures. These qualities were felt by the people even before they were praised by the critics. Apart from all religious prepossessions, men and women and children were fascinated by the native power and grace of the book. The English Bible was popular, in the broadest sense, long before it was recognized as one of our noblest classics. It has colored the talk of the household and the street, as well as molded the language of scholars. It has been something more than "a well of English undefiled"; it has become a part of the spiritual atmosphere. We hear the echoes of its speech everywhere, and the music of its familiar phrases haunts all the fields and groves of our fine literature.

It is not only to the theologians and the sermon makers that we look for biblical allusions and quotations. We often find the very best and most vivid of them in writers professedly secular. Poets like Shakspere, Milton, and Wordsworth; novelists like Scott, and romancers like Hawthorne; essayists like Bacon, Steele, and Addison; critics of life, unsystematic philosophers, like Carlyle and Ruskinall draw upon the Bible as a treasury of illustrations, and use it as a book equally familiar to themselves and to their readers. It is impossible to put too high a value upon such a universal volume, even as a purely literary possession. It forms a bond of sympathy between the most cultivated and the simplest of the people. The same book lies upon the desk of the scholar and in the cupboard of the peasant. If you touch upon one of its narratives, every

one knows what you mean. If you allude to one of its characters or scenes, your readers' memory supplies an instant picture to illuminate your point. And so long as its words are studied by little children at their mother's knees and recognized by high critics as the model of pure English, we may be sure that neither the jargon of science nor the slang of ignorance will be able to create a shibboleth to divide the people of our common race. There will be a medium of communication in the language and imagery of the English Bible.

This much, by way of introduction, I have felt it necessary to say, in order to mark the spirit and purpose of this essay. For the poet whose works we are to study is at once one of the most scholarly and one of the most widely popular of English writers. At least one cause of his popularity is that there is so much of the Bible in Tennyson. How much, few even of his most ardent lovers begin to understand.

I do not know that the attempt has ever been made before to collect and collate all the scriptural allusions and quotations in his works, and to trace the golden threads which he has woven from that source into the woof of his poetry. The delight of "fresh woods and pastures new so rare in this over-explored age- -has thus been mine. But I do not mean to let this delight misguide me into the error of trying to crowd all my gathered treasures into a single article. There are nearly three hundred direct references to the Bible in the poems of Tennyson; and simply to give a list of them might tax the patience of the gentlest magazine reader so heavily that it would vanish clean out of existence. It will be more prudent merely to offer, first, a few examples of scriptural quotation, and then a few specimens of scriptural illustration, and then to trace a few of the lines of thought and feeling in which Tennyson shows most clearly the influence of the Bible.

I.

ON the table at which I am writing lies the first publication which bears the name of Alfred Tennyson-a thin pamphlet in faded gray paper, containing the "Prolusiones Academicæ," recited at the University of Cambridge in 1829. Among them is one with the title, "Timbuctoo: A Poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal, etc. By A. Tennyson, of Trinity College."

On the eleventh page, in a passage describ

ing the spirit of poetry which fills the branches of the "great vine of Fable," we find these lines:

There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway The heart of man; and teach him to attain By shadowing forth the Unattainable; And step by step to scale that mighty stair Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds Of glory of heaven.

And at the bottom of the page stands this footnote: "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."

This is the earliest biblical allusion which we can identify in the writings of Tennyson. Even the most superficial glance will detect its beauty and power. There are few who have not felt the lofty attraction of the teachings of Christ, in which the ideal of holiness shines so far above our reach, while we are continually impelled to climb towards it. Especially these very words about perfection, which he spoke in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. v. 48), have often lifted us upward just because they point our aspirations to a goal so high that it seems inaccessible. The young poet who sets a jewel like this in his earliest work shows not only that he has understood the moral sublimity of the doctrine of Christ, but also that he has rightly conceived the mission of noble poetry to idealize and elevate human life. Once and again in his later writings we see the same picture of the soul rising step by step

To higher things,

and catch a glimpse of those vast altar-stairs

That slope through darkness up to God.

In the poem entitled "Isabel "-one of the best in the slender volume of 1830-there is a line which reminds us that Tennyson must have known his New Testament in the original language. He says that all the fairest forms of nature are types of the noble woman whom he is describing

And thou of God in thy great charity.

No one who was not familiar with the Greek of St. Paul and St. John would have been bold enough to speak of the "charity of God." It is a phrase which throws a golden light upon the thirteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians and brings the human love into harmony and unison with the divine.

"The May Queen" is a poem which has sung itself into the hearts of the people everywhere. The tenderness of its sentiment and the exquisite cadence of its music have made it beloved in spite of its many faults. Yet I suppose that the majority of readers have read it again and again without recognizing

that one of its most melodious verses is a nearly direct quotation from the third chapter of Job: And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary

are at rest.

This is one of the instances-by no means rare-in which the translators of our English Bible have fallen unconsciously into the rhythm of the most perfect poetry; and it felicitous use of the words of the Scriptures. is perhaps the best illustration of Tennyson's

But there are others, hardly less perfect, in the wonderful sermon which the rector in Edith and Leolin. It is a mosaic of Bible "Aylmer's Field" delivers after the death of language, most curiously wrought, and fused into one living whole by the heat of an inof prophetic grief and indignation recurs that tense sorrow. How like a heavy, dull refrain dreadful text:

Your house is left unto you desolate!

the force of a superhuman and unimpassioned wrath to the preacher's language, and the passage stands as a monumental denunciation of The social wants that sin against the strength of youth.

The solemn associations of the words lend

contain some beautiful fragments of Scripture Enoch Arden's parting words to his wife

embedded in the verse:

Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.1
Is he not yonder in those uttermost
Parts of the morning? If I flee to these 2
Can I go from him? and the sea is his,
The sea is his: he made it.3

The "Idylls of the King" are full of delicate and suggestive allusions to the Bible. Take, for instance, the lines from "The Holy Grail": For when the Lord of all things made himself Naked of glory for his mortal change.

Here is a commentary, most illuminative, on the sixth and seventh verses of the second chapter of Philippians. Or again, in the same Idyll, where the hermit says to Sir Percivale, after his unsuccessful quest,

Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself, we are reminded of the words of Christ telling us the secret of all victory in spiritual things: "He that loseth his life. .. shall find it."

In "The Coming of Arthur," while the trumpet blows and the city seems on fire with sunlight dazzling on cloth of gold, the long procession of knights passes before the king, singing its great song of allegiance. The Idyll Peter, v. 7; Heb. vi. 19.

1

2 Psalm cxxxix. 9.

3 Psalm xcv. 5.

is full of warrior's pride and delight of battle, clanging battle-ax and flashing brand a true song for the heavy fighters of the days of chivalry. But it has also a higher touch, a strain of spiritual grandeur, which, although it may have no justification in an historical picture of the Round Table, yet serves to lift these knights of the poet's imagination into an ideal realm and set them marching as ghostly heroes of faith and loyalty through all ages.

The king will follow Christ, and we the king. Compare this line with the words of St. Paul: "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ." They teach us that the lasting devotion of men is rendered not to the human, but to the divine, in their heroes. He who would lead others must first learn to follow One who is higher than himself. Without faith it is not only impossible to please God, but also impossible to rule men. King Arthur is the ideal of one who has heard a secret word of promise and seen a vision of more than earthly glory, by virtue of which he becomes the leader and master of his knights, able to inspire their hopes and unite their aspirations and bind their service to himself.

And now turn to one of the last poems which Tennyson has given us-"Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." Sad enough is its lament for broken dreams, dark with the gloom of declining years, when the grasshopper has become a burden, and desire has failed, and the weary heart has grown afraid of that which is high; but at the close the old man rises again to the sacred strain:

Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.

Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.

Follow Light, and do the Right-for man can

half-control his doom

Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant

tomb.

II.

touch the first notes of well-known airs, and then memory will supply the accompaniment to enrich his music. This is what Tennyson has done, with the instinct of genius, in his references to the stories and personages of the Bible.

His favorite allusion is to Eden and the mystical story of Adam and Eve. This occurs again and again, in "The Day Dream," "Maud," "In Memoriam," "The Gardener's Daughter," "The Princess," (6 Milton," "Geraint and Enid,” and “Lady Clara Vere de Vere." The last instance is perhaps the most interesting, on account of a double change which has been made in the form of the allusion. In the edition of 1832, the first in which the poem appeared, the self-assertive peasant who refuses to become a lover says to the lady of high degree: Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,

From yon blue heavens above us bent
The gardener Adam and his wife

Smile at the claims of long descent.

In later editions this was altered to "The

grand old gardener and his wife." But in this form the reference was open to misunderstanding. I remember a charming young woman the lines referred to some particularly pious who once told me that she had always thought old man who had formerly taken care of Lady Clara's flower-beds, and who now smiled from heaven at the foolish pride of his mistress. So perhaps it is just as well that Tennyson restored the line, in 1873, to its original form, and gave us "the gardener Adam" again, to remind us of the quaint distich

When Adam dolve and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman ?

The story of Jephtha's daughter is another. of the Old Testament narratives for which the poet seems to have a predilection. It is told with great beauty and freedom in "A Dream of Fair Women"; "Aylmer's Field " touches upon it; and it recurs again in "The Flight."

In "The Princess" we find the Queen of Sheba, Vashti, Miriam, Jael, Lot's wife, Jonah's gourd, and the Tower of Babel. And, if your copy of the Bible has the Apocrypha in it, you may add the story of Judith and Holofernes.

Esther appears in "Geraint and Enid," and Rahab in "Queen Mary." In "Godiva" we read of the Earl's heart

As rough as Esau's hand;

and in "Locksley Hall" we see the picture

At gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon. The sonnet to " Bonaparte" recalls to our memory

Those whom Gideon schooled with briers.

gratify my never quite forgotten desire to know more of this interesting poison. One day, however, a man offered me a small lot of snakes, and just then I learned of a supposed antidote invented, it was said, by the famous French herpetologist, Bibron. In fact he never did invent an antidote, and how the queer mixture of iodine and corrosive sublimate got his authoritative name is still a mystery. I began in 1859 to study the matter, and soon found that the antidote was worthless, and that no one knew much about snake venoms. Not quite a hundred years previous Fontana wrote on the poison of vipers an immortal work, and nearly another century before him there were written two quaint books,

life by pupils of the Government schools, are here grouped so as to show at a glance all the typical Indian poisonous serpents.

Twenty-four years after my first essay, the Smithsonian published1 the results of another four years of additional work on the problems which had interested me in my early life. Much of what I did in 1859 to 1862 needed no reëxamination, but new questions had arisen, and novel and accurate methods were now at our disposal. Moreover, I had been haunted for a year or more by the idea that serpent poisons might not be simple but complex, not one thing but a mixture of two or more, and that this might explain the causes of the difference be

one by Redi, 1664, and one by Charas, 1673. Both of these little volumes are still worth reading. Charas's belief in the value of volatile salt of the ashes of calcined vipers as a remedy for viper bite is an instructive exhibition of a form of medical idiocy not without modern illustrations.

My own researches were carried on in the intervals of a life of great occupation, and were published in 1862 by the Smithsonian Institution. About 1872, unaided by Government, in a climate where heat makes all labor difficult, and at a cost in the way of money and mortal risks which few can comprehend, an Indian surgeon, now Sir Joseph Fayrer, created on this subject a vast mass of material knowledge which without reward he gave to the Government of India. The illustration on this page was meant for a frontispiece to his splendid volume, but was for some reason unused and came to me as a gift from Fayrer. The snakes, drawn from

tween rattlesnake and cobra bites, and possibly give the clue to methods of successful treatment. When a maggot like this gets into the brain of a man accustomed to want to know why, it breeds a variety of troublesome pleasures. In my case it drove me once more to the laboratory, and caused me to seek the skillful aid of Dr. Edward T. Reichert, now Professor of Physiology in the University of Pennsylvania. Together we solved many perplexing problems. As some of these have for the general reader an unusual interest, I purpose to restate here a few of our results, since our large Smithsonian memoir is not likely to come before many of the readers of THE CENTURY.

It has occurred to me that in telling my story it might be well to show in popular shape how the work was done, as well as its results. To make it clearer, I must first explain the

1 "Researches on Serpent Poisons," by S. Weir Mitchell, M. D., and Prof. E. T. Reichert.