“It is a mingled rapture, and we find
The bodily spirit mounting to the mind.”
Bards have sung its praises, traditions have hallowed it, and philosophers have revelled in the gentle pastime, from the days of Oppian and Homer down to Walton, Christopher North and Tennyson.
Although the art of fly-fishing was not known to the ancients, the poetry of angling has been enriched by the bards of ye-olden-time to a remarkable degree. In Pope’s translation of the Iliad, the following passage occurs:
“As from some rock that overhangs the flood,
The silent fisher casts the insidious food;
With fraudful care he waits the finny prize,
Then sudden lifts it quivering to the skies.”
One of the most familiar of Æsop’s fables, in rhyme, is that of the Fisherman and the Little Fish, while Theocritus, who flourished about the year 270 B. c., gives us a spirited idyl representing the life of a Greek fisherman. Oppian and Aristotle each prepared a classical volume on fish and fishing. Pliny in his “Historia Naturalis” treats at length of the finny tribes, and Ansonius in his poem, “Mostella,” describes the tench, salmon and other varieties of fish.
Among the early contributions to English literature on angling, the “Poeticæ,” generally attributed to a Scottish balladist known as Blind Harry, is conspicuous. Then the “Boke of St. Albans,” by Dame Juliana Berners, and quaint old Izaak Walton’s “Compleat Angler”—a brace of classic volumes dear to the heart of all who love the rod and reel.