When if or chance or hunger's powerful sway
Directs the roving trout this fatal way,
He greedily sucks in the twining bait,
And tugs and nibbles the fallacious meat.
To fish in troubled waters.
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?
A fishing-rod was a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
My fishing is a very pleasant amusement; but
angling or float fishing, I can only compare to a
stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a
fool at the other.
La ligne, avec sa canne, est un long instrument,
Dont le plus mince bout tient un petit reptile,
Et dont l'autre est tenu par un grand imbecile.
His angle-rod made of a sturdy oak;
His line, a cable which in storms ne'er broke; His hook he baited with a dragon's tail,— And sat upon a rode, and bobb'd for whale. William King—Upon a Giant's Angling. (In Chalmers's British Poets.)
Down and back at day dawn,
Tramp from lake to lake,
Washing brain and heart clean
Every step we take.
Leave to Robert Browning
Beggars, fleas, and vines;
Leave to mournful Buskin
Popish Apennines,
Dirty stones of Venice,
And his gas lamps seven,
We've the stones of Snowdon
And the lamps of heaven.
In a bowl to sea went wise men three,
On a brilliant night in June:
They carried a net, and their hearts were set
On fishing up the moon.
In genial spring, beneath the quivering shade,
Where cooling vapors breathe along the mead,
The patient fisher takes his silent stand,
Intent, his angle trembling in his hand;
With looks unmov'd, he hopes the scaly breed,
And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed.
Give me mine angle, we'll to the river; there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws.
The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait.
Shrimps and the delicate periwinkle
Such are the sea-fruits lasses love:
Ho! to your nets till the blue stars twinkle,
And the shutterless cottages gleam above!
But should you lure
From his dark haunt, beneath the tangled roots
Of pendent trees, the Monarch of the brook,
Behoves you then to ply your finest art.
Two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the way without crying out, "What luck?"
'Tis an affair of luck.
Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt.
As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
I shall stay him no longer than to wish * * * that if he be an honest angler, the east wind may never blow when he goes a fishing.
Angling is somewhat like Poetry, men are to be born so.
Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
