116 GLAUCUS ; OR, 



Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of 

 order, even in a popular scientific book ; and 

 yet one cannot help at moments envying the 

 old Greek imagination, which could inform the 

 soulless sea-world with a human life and beauty. 

 For after all, star-fishes and sea-anemones are 

 dull substitutes for Sirens and Tritons ; the 

 lamps of the sea-nymphs, those glorious phos- 

 phorescent medusaj whose beauty Mr. Gosse sets 

 forth so well with pen and pencil, are not as 

 attractive as the sea-nymphs themselves would 

 be ; and who would not, hke Menelaus, take the 

 gray old man of the sea himself, asleep upon the 

 rocks, rather than one of his seal-herd, probably 

 too with the same result as the world-famous 

 combat in the Antiquary, between Hector and 

 Phoca ? And yet — is there no human interest 

 in these pursuits, more human, ay, and more 

 divine, than there would be even in those Triton 

 and Nereid dreams, if reaUzed to sight and 

 sense ? Heaven forbid that those should say so, 

 whose wanderings among rock and pool have 

 been mixed up with holiest passages of friendship 

 and of love, and the intercommunion of equal 

 minds and sympathetic hearts, and the laugh of 

 children drinking in health from every breeze, 

 and instruction at every step, running ever and 



