THE BOOK OF THE GREAT SEA-DRAGONS. 
25 
career over him, silent and forgotten quite ; what agonies 
of joy and rage, what mighty throes of being have been, 
and how often felt throughout the Realm of Seas, since 
first the Dragon Lorded there, and also since the time of 
his final death-struggle therein. How many Revolutions 
of the Universe have passed since this Monster dread ; how 
many Races have or tramped, or fleeted with wing, or 
with fin, over his desolate bones. 
Dead these illimitable years, and oblivious are the 
Dragons, they are come to a certain finis, and realize the 
fact of a machine, contrived for none imaginable End 
worthy of a god, and cast away by the Inventor, or aban¬ 
doned for an unknown reason. Generated soon after 
the advent of Time, and extinguished long before the birth 
of any Creature cognate of Time, these old Sea-Dragons 
afford the most comprehensive Index of Eternity known 
by sheer negations and emblems, so abstract, that the na¬ 
tural Eye of Man entirely fails them, as it also fails him 
in the solution of the distances of telescopic Suns.. 
The Works of Jehovah being liable to no such an im¬ 
putation and a like fate, these Dragons verify the action 
of some other Power in the remotest ages of our Earth. 
With this silken thread of Truth we may enter the 
Caverns of Time, speculate with propriety upon the Moral 
Mysteries therein concealed, and anatomize them all. 
Reverently bowing our faces to the ground we trace 
the Shadow of Jehovah, the serpent Hanahash, through 
Sinuous Gulfs of Machiavellian depth. If, indeed, that 
Fallen Angel did spawn forth the kindred but mortal 
Dragons, in the bent of his malignant temper, Creative, 
and lighting up the uncouth animal Frame thereof with a 
sparkle of that dismal fire which constitutes his very 
essence, and no less his tearless woe, sent it upon the 
bloody mission to kill and yet kill on, until the Gene¬ 
rations being fulfilled, and the last murderer murdered 
by Time in his righteous turn, the hellish animus expelled 
thence, reverted to the Father of its accursed being. Or, 
if handling inanimate clay, and fashioning it into the 
hideous shape we recover in these Sea-Dragon bones, 
Evil then did himself enter therein to possess it, to pro¬ 
pagate like monstrosities wherewith to dog, and terrify, 
and aggrieve the Earthly Dominions ; and conceiving 
other monsters, horrid Cancer, cramped Urchin, or Polyp 
with enormous tentacles, or the Dragon with wing glazed 
skinny for air or for sea, ferocious all, did imbue them 
with his Legionary Angels, gloating upon one another 
furies, instant for universal War; when lo ! the Times 
being ripe, the Armies gathered together, they fell at one 
fell swoop of the Incarnate Fiend himself, which, crown¬ 
ing the numberless heap of abhorred bodies at Arma¬ 
geddon, with his own giant one, left Futurity those vast 
Reservoirs of pitch, and magazines of sulphur and other 
poisonous salts, fermenting the carcases of these Anakim 
cast off. 
Or, journeying from black Tartarus, that Old Serpent 
coming into the light of the blessed Sun, ambushed awhile 
from fear in the unfurnished and silent chambers of the 
Ocean-Earth, whilom Jehovah, leaving matter to an inevi¬ 
table process, omniscient, well knowing the End at the 
which He overruleth the Prince of darkness, suffered it to 
pass. I say that Old Serpent ambushing did attract the 
night of things, the antipodes out of which sprang this 
savage brood, inspirited with the drunken fumes, the sa¬ 
turnine aura of his abhorrent being. 
Python, his Battles in Heaven ended hopelessly, the 
Battlements of Heaven so guarded that attempt them 
when or wherever he may yet still in vain; Python, 
banished the Universe he aimed at in Evil day, abandoned 
to himself throughout Eternity in the Antipodal fiery, or 
frozen, and blasted One, driven in his frantic course upon 
the verge of this new world of matter, caught all the 
antithesis thereof upon the instant. 
Through the, to us, long and dreary Revolutions of an 
Embryo Planet, exposed to all imaginable cometary ex¬ 
tremes of drought and deluge, through Earth, Air, Fire, 
and Water, and all the other numberless anarchical condi¬ 
tions unimaginable, Hanahash rioted. The tragic Colossus, 
next once to Jehovah, to whom once bowed all but One, 
rioted through all the interstices of atoms, disguising the 
dark sides thereof at his will, and ruling them in the mind 
of a god : Over the chaotic Earth he sent light obliquous, 
through the Deeps turbulence, so that the Elements, 
wrested to his purpose, nourished the animal spirits of his 
Sea-Dragons, over-populating the whole world, War and 
Death reigning over them all without end : The molecular 
bodies caught in his fatal vortice, arranging themselves in 
obedience to an imperative Law of mind, resulting in the 
Taninim we set forth, and other carnivorous automata 
long since ceased from the Book of life. 
The great work of Creation progressing to a point, the 
Allmighty Ruler could but observe these foreign and aspic 
things, and the merest comment of the Creator sufficed 
for their utter evanishment from the Earth : the mere 
atoms themselves, rejected by Jehovah, remaining alone 
from the neighboring parts, kept apart from God’s Earth 
evermore. 
And here in the latter days, now when the mental 
powers of the post-diluvians are, perhaps, at the very 
lowest ebb, at their very aphelion relatively to the Father 
of Lights, now when all intuition of Truth, either foregone 
or to Come, all the Faculties of that wisdom prophetical 
so esteemed by the earlier nations, the decay of which was 
parallel with Their gradual atrophy, now, when all these 
Faculties lie torpid in the bosom of our general Race, do 
these Skeletons of desecrated matter, these Hordes of the 
Spiritual Attila which ruled in the dark Ages before 
Adam over the circumfluent Earth, protrude upon our 
sight, invoking memories which even the dire Conflagration 
of accomplished Earth shall fail to quench, eternal ever. 
As though Evil himself, foreseeing the tragical History 
of Man, essayed these monsters, anticipating other Furies 
to be loosened upon us, when subjected to Demons, so 
that he might the more certainly know how to deform, 
animalize, and convert mind itself into a capacity of 
Horror unimaginable and infinite. Upon a Verge so awful 
we stand aghast: at the feet of the Precipice roar the 
Black Waters of revolted Times, urging to the Heavens. 
The Panorama of Ages stretching out into waste and 
Desolation, nourishing monsters alien both to the Consti¬ 
tution and the Soul of man. Blast shrieking to blast 
continuous, Providence laughed to scorn, the Fortunes of 
man abandoned to Fiends. 
These Sea-dragons, of them we may treat learnedly by 
what a wondrous appliance of ribbed joints they com¬ 
pressed air into the lung, by which to sustain themselves a 
long while when driven to the nether depths. With what 
a cunning machine of eye they trapped and made use of 
God’s blessed light, with what incarnate guile they ac¬ 
complished a life abhorred of Jehovah : we may trace the 
channels of poison which distilled from their livid gums, 
H 
