112 GLAUCUS; OR, 



and its failures, lias been rushing out of eternity and 

 into eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita 

 beheld the race of men, issuing from Kreeshna's 

 flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again, "as 

 the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the 

 homeless streams leap down into the ocean bed," in 

 an everlasting heart-pulse whose blood is living 

 souls — and all that while, and ages before that mys- 

 tery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark 

 sea-floor, has been "continuing as it was at the 

 beginning," and fulfilling " the law which cannot be 

 broken," while races and dynasties and generations 

 have been 



" Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven, 

 As make the angels weep." 



Yes ; it is this vision of the awful permanence and 

 perfection of the natural world, beside the wild flux 

 and confusion, the mad struggles, the despairing cries 

 of that world of spirits which man has defiled by sm, 

 which would at moments crush the naturalist's heart, 

 and make his brain swim with terror, were it not that 



