1 8 The Poets and Nature. 



" The turtle of a great and glorious size, 

 Worth its own weight in gold, a mighty prize 

 For which a man of taste all risks would run ; 

 Itself a feast, and ev'ry dish in one." 



Though a creature to laugh over when we see it creeping 

 stealthily about on tip-toe, as if it were abroad for the pur- 

 pose of picking pockets, it has a very notable place in myth, 

 and was almost universally reverenced. The East believes 

 that the world rests upon a tortoise, which rests upon 

 nothing and what a grand old testacean it is, this Vedic 

 turtle, standing simply on its own dignity, and yet uphold- 

 ing upon its Atlantean carapace all the burdens of the round 

 world, and of them that dwell therein ! Here is a subject 

 for Walt Whitman himself, the self-sufficient, democratic, 

 thewy-and-sinewy, double-sexed, bully-for-you, old tortoise. 

 More power to your shell, sir ! We creeping things take 

 off our hats to you, testudinous ancient. And how splendidly 

 the deliberate thing looms out of Hindoo myth as the 

 hereditary foe of the mystical elephant, the Darkness. 



The Red Indian to this day says that in the beginning of 

 things there was nothing but a tortoise. It brooded upon 

 space : covered Chaos as with a lid. But after a while it 

 woke up : its solitary existence was irksome to it, and it 

 sank splendidly into the abysmal depths ; and lo ! when it 

 re-emerged, there was the terrestrial globe upon its back ! 

 For something to do, it had fished up our earth from the 

 depths in the protoplasmic fluids, and, rather than be idle, 

 it still keeps on holding it up. But some day it will sink 

 again, and then will come the End with Ragnarok and 

 Armageddon. 



In Greek and Roman fancies, the tortoise hardly fares so 

 well. It is the form to which a bright nymph, who had 

 jested at the nuptials of Zeus and Here', was turned into by 

 Mercury ; and ridicule falls upon the greatest of the Greeks 

 when a tortoise falls upon his head. Yet they, too, knew of 



