164 GLAUCUS ; OR, 



little geranium did its best, like a lieaven-sent angel, 

 to right the wrong which man's ignorance had be- 

 gotten, and drank in, day by day, the poisoned 

 atmosphere, and formed it into fair green leaves, and 

 breathed into the children's faces from every pore, 

 whenever they bent over it, the life-giving oxygen 

 for which their dulled blood and festered lungs were 

 craving in vain ; fulfilling God's will itself, though 

 man would not, too careless or too covetous to see, 

 after thousands of years of boasted progress, why 

 God had covered the earth with grass, herb, and tree, 

 a living and life-giving garment of perpetual health 

 and youth. 



It is too sad to think long about, lest we become 

 very Heraclituses. Let us take the other side of the 

 matter with Democritus, try to laugh man out of 

 a little of his boastful ignorance and self-satisfied 

 clumsiness, and tell him, that if the House of Com- 

 mons would but summon one of the little Paramecia 

 from any Thames' sewer-mouth, to give his evidence 

 before their next Cholera Committee, sanatory blue- 

 books, invaluable as they are, would be superseded 



