The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be accurate when they particularize. We expect them to see the fact through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the medium must not distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it, it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history. I doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this respect, except where he followed the superstition and the imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey- bee. His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer. For instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into the mouth of Banquo!-- "This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved masonry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze. Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, The air is delicate." Nature is of course universal, but in the same sense is she local and particular,--cuts every suit to fit the wearer, gives every land an earth and sky of its own, and a flora and fauna to match. The poets and their readers delight in local touches. We have both the hare and the rabbit in America, but this line from Thomson's description of a summer morning,-- "And from the bladed field the fearful hare limps awkward,"-- or this from Beattie,-- "Through rustling corn the hare astonished sprang"-- would not apply with the same force in New England, because our hare is never found in the fields, but in dense, remote woods. In England both hares and rabbits abound to such an extent that in places the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the ground is undermined by their burrows, till they become a serious pest to the farmer, and are trapped in vast numbers. The same remark applies to this from Tennyson:-- "From the woods Came voices of the well-contented doves."