THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 125 
perfection of the natural world, beside the wild flux 
and confusion, the mad struggles, the despairing 
cries of the world of spirits which man has defiled 
by sin, which would at moments crush the natu- 
ralist’s heart, and make his brain swim with terror, 
were it not that he can see by faith, through all the 
abysses and the ages, not merely 
“Hands, 
From out the darkness, shaping man ;” 
but above them a living loving countenance, human 
and yet Divine; and can hear a voice which said at 
first, “Let us make man in our image;” and hath 
said since then, and says for ever and for ever, 
“Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of 
the world.” 
But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, 
and at least amused—if, as Professor Harvey well 
says, the simpler animals represent, as in a glass, the 
scattered organs of the higher races, which of your 
organs is represented by that “sea’d man’s head,” 
which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with 
less adherence to plain likeness, call “ mermaid’s 
