CHAPTER VI. 

 LUCIFERS AND THE POETS. 



" They made her a grave too cold and damp 

 For a soul so warm and true, 

 And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp 

 Where, all night long, by a firefly lamp 

 She paddles her white canoe." Moore. 



ONE of the most satisfying and impressive facts in nature is, 

 I think, the illumination by phosphorescent creatures of the 

 deep sea. Popularly, the ocean depths stand as a synonym 

 for more than sepulchral darkness, and in legends and poetry 

 some incidental lustre is imagined in order to make the 

 profundity fit for the habitation of the sea-folk. So their 

 cavern-palaces are lit up by gems. 



Sometimes, as in Keats, where the hero follows the curves 

 of the shore in his sub-aqueous excursions, and so keeps in 

 the comparative shallows, the water is of course sufficiently 

 translucent to afford the Nereids' grottos and the mermaids' 

 haunts a soft dim light of deep sea-green. But the real 

 abysses of oceans are not the scenes of adventure either in 

 legend or in poetry, for these concern themselves only with 

 the smaller seas and with bays and straits and rocky coasts. 

 In the days when legends were making, the mid-ocean lay 

 outside the sphere of song-smiths' knowledge, and almost of 

 their speculation. It had its monarch, and he his court; 

 but their apparitions and apocalypses occurred only in waters 

 within the manners' ken, and, as a rule, at such distance 



from the shore that men standing on the cliff could point 



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