Lucifers and the Poets. 251 



how various, how important in combination, the light-givers 

 of the ocean are. Yet even they, the radiant bodies in motion, 

 do not suffice for nature. For she has made many, if not 

 all, the submarine corals phosphorescent, and much of the 

 deep-sea sand is nitrated with minute organisms that are on 

 occasion, or always, luminous. As if this were not enough 

 that she should provide the fishes with incandescent walls 

 and floors, and should set afloat in all directions moving 

 lamps nature has affixed to the rock-edges " where young 

 lampyris waves his plumes of gold," deep under water, and 

 to the dangerous cliffs which the mariner-fishes might strike 

 on if not for danger-signals, actual lighthouses, and with 

 revolving lights too ! These are some of the anemones, 

 which, as they throw out and withdraw their tentacles, 

 alternately show and extinguish a beacon on the brink of 

 projecting ledges or the entrances to gloomy caverns. Others, 

 again, like the pholas, are veritable lightships, having lustrous 

 bodies enclosed in shells, and steering their way along the 

 edges of the submarine cliffs as if warning off the incautious 

 navigator. 



Is not all this wonderful ? But surely it surpasses all 

 the regular electric light "laid down" as it were, the 

 phosphorescent walls and so forth, the lighthouses and the 

 lightships that there should be races of fishes who carry 

 bull's-eye lanterns about with them. For what else is the 

 ipnops which we read of in the Challengers voyages, whose 

 two eyes throw out blazing rays before it as it swims ? or what 

 else are the score of species which have their bull's-eyes on 

 their flanks, and, like a hansom with its lamp on either side, 

 shoot along by the light of the lights they carry ? 



What a delightful range of subject and metaphor all this, 

 had it been known, would have offered to the poets of pre- 

 Tennysonian days ! How many old ideas would have had 

 to be dismissed ! how many more beautiful might have taken 

 their places ! 



