162 GLAUCUS ; OE, 



clearer and clearer to tlie ear at every stroke : and as 

 we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a brave 

 and wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such 

 western paradise, but rather in the infernos of tliis 

 sinful earth, toiling even then amid the festering 

 alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate 

 death and misery which they had vainly laboured to 

 prevent, watching the strides of that very cholera 

 which they had been striving for years to ward off, 

 now re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the 

 carelessness, and laziness, and greed of sinful man. 

 And as I thought over the whole hapless question of 

 sanatory reform, proved long since a moral duty to 

 God and man, possible, easy, even pecuniarily profit- 

 able, and yet left undone ; there seemed a sublime 

 irony, most humbling to man, in some of l^ature's 

 processes, and in the silent and unobtrusive perfec- 

 tion with wdiich she has been taught to anticipate, 

 since the foundation of the world, some of the loftiest 

 discoveries of modern science, of which we are too 

 apt to boast as if we had created the method by dis- 

 covering its possibility. Created it? Alas for the 



