236 LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF NATURE. 



of strange, fantastic shapes, unbounded forests of colossal 

 reeds and flags, overshadowed the shores of the dark ocean, 

 encircled with dense night, large, ever-silent marshes, and 

 crowned in graceful groups the table-lands of these islands. 

 But silence brooded over them all. As no flower ever 

 graced their lofty columns, so no bird ever sang in their 

 branches, no deer ever rested in peace under their shadow. 

 The sea alone, the great sea, had its life. Here the huge, 

 flat head of a monstrous lizard rose heavily from under 

 the roots of a mighty fern; there a shark of unmeasured 

 dimensions shot, like a flash of lightning, through the 

 turbid flood ; polypi, snails of quaint shape, and muscles 

 resplendent in brightest colors, crowded the shallow estu- 

 aries. A thousand curious forms, no longer found upon 

 earth, peopled the silent waters, and generation after gen- 

 eration passed away, unseen by man and unknown for 

 countless ages to come. 



They rose, they lived, and they died in utter silence and 

 darkness. They returned dust to dust, or they sank into 

 the bottomless ocean. Now the fury of fiery volcanoes 

 would bury whole forests under masses of burning por- 

 phyry and basalt then the sea itself would rise in solemn 

 majesty, and, racing upwards, fall upon ancient woods, 

 breaking down young and old, high and low, and leaving 

 behind it but one vast mass of sand and stone, under 

 which it had hid all their glorious beauty. Where neither 

 fire nor water came, with giants' power, to destroy, the 

 huge ferns died a slow and silent death. One by one 

 they would sink, weary of life and worn out by the fierce 

 storm all around them, until gentle rains came, and with 



