THE BOOK OF THE GREAT SEA-DRAGONS. 
21 
CHAPTER VI. 
OF THE GREAT SEA-DRAGONS—PLESIOSAURI. 
W ERE it possible to abstract mankind from the 
habits and artificial conventions of ages, and refer 
them back to the original Constitution of Man, it is 
highly probable that we should find nothing positively 
abhorrent to our feelings throughout ail Creation: unless, 
indeed, some Great Principle, antagonist to tjie one by 
whom we are made, had introduced therein objects evoked 
from an Element hostile and injurious to our own. 
For it is impossible to conceive that the Almighty 
would sow the seeds of Death in a Garden planted for 
His Pleasure, or deform the Palaces thereof by additions 
damnatory of the Work itself, and fill them with unclean 
Races for ever at strife with the Favorite for whom it was 
especially built. And if we admit the inhabitation of the 
Seas, long before Adam, by baleful Monsters, and in 
them a manifest Power allied to Pain and his attendant 
Horrors, it is easy, nay, reasonable to suppose that the 
Lord of the Earth himself was to be endowed with a sense 
of so much Greatness, that he would stand in the midst of 
them all, inviolate of strength, and unmindful of them as 
a god. 
We may pursue the problem farther, and imagine with 
a Phidias, an Apollo, and Python destroyed in the pas¬ 
sionless Spirit immortalized in his Statue; or with 
Rafael, Michael the Archangel treading down Satan, 
with a brow serene and a mind unruffled as the waters of 
the River of Life. 
The perfection of a Creature cannot be predicated if 
he be conscious of fear. For this, Milton describes Ab- 
diel repelling the contumelious assaults of the Rebel 
Armies of Heaven, and passing calm and undaunted 
through them all. It was the Essence of things, through 
all the Works of Jehovah downward from the loftiest 
Angels, the only question being where those Works do 
end. 
On the other hand, were it not foreign to our Text, we 
might speculate upon the intolerable pangs which seize 
a fallen and lost, or an originally vicious Creature, when 
placed in apposition with Elements of Good subversive of 
his very being. 
The Ideas then, and the terms used to denote them of 
things repugnant, are by no means indigenous to the 
human understanding, but forced upon us by the hapless 
circumstances in which we are found. And, presuming 
with the Ancients and the Easterns even of our own day, 
that besides Jehovah, another Being has been engaged in 
peopling this Planet, surely no one can object to our 
calling bitter not sweet, and monsters of surpassing ug¬ 
liness the hardest Names. 
The Mythic Serpents graven of old upon idolatrous 
altars and Temples, and introduced in the commonest 
occasions and uses of Life, extorted a Sentiment from 
Pagan Nations, grateful only to the Cruel Demon they 
represented, and by the frequency of this personal mani¬ 
festation, the Great Enemy of our Race hoped utterly 
to deaden and kill the Instinctive Love of Beauty which 
survived the Fall, and finally brutalize the whole Earth. 
In the earlier Campaigns, Anak had the advantage, the 
Adamites deserted their Standard, signalized themselves 
in his wars, and paid, too, the penalty of Treason in those 
Waters, which the Earth invoked wherewith to cleanse 
away the impurities with which they had filled her: but 
a Deluge were insufficient for the renewal of the once 
spotless Constitution of Man, the post-diluvians were, in 
their turn, beguiled, if not to so great enormity, into 
frailties of the above fatal kind, and their dispositions 
became Evil Continually. 
The Life and Immortality which in due Season spring 
to light, open an entirely new Scene for the Energies of 
Man: Now laying hold upon Heaven, he fearlessly 
handleth aspic things, combatting Evil with his own 
weapons, in that World so well-nigh conquered for his 
own. Here too he often stumbles upon the wrecks of 
Victories won over Evil in Times anterior to the Fortunes 
of Mankind, which it has been the policy of the Old 
Dragon to conceal from our knowledge to the last; for 
not alone since Adam have the Two Dread Principles, 
Osiris and Typhon, battled for Dominion over the Earth ; 
it has been the theatre of many another War, and the 
bones of these great Sea-dragons, Plesiosauri, are the 
remains of but one of the vile Colonies from Tophet, 
which Jehovah visited with Wrath, and swept out of the 
World in a whirlwind of Fury and Indignation for ever. 
Each and every of the Kingdoms accursed shall be des¬ 
troyed in like manner, and the arch-Ruler thereof driven 
at last to his remaining Citadel in the human heart, be 
cast out even thence into Perdition everlasting. 
The mere ordinary common-places, then, which invest 
alike all animate and inanimate things, of size, of color, of 
kind, we again declare our total indifference to them all; 
when Science bestows more than a passing glance upon 
them, she forgets the dignity which alone makes her truly 
worshipful. A hair in a telescope obscures a Star, and 
in this way the whole Universe may shrink into a Span, 
and the Past and Future vanish before the momentless 
Present, while the observer, unconscious of his situation, 
dreams away, comatous and useless quite, contemplating 
Effects apart from the latent Principles out of which they 
come. 
These Taninim ! we seize them as with a divine furor; 
more intelligible than the Rosetta Stone, they constitute 
the only Key to Tongues pregnant with Facts of the most 
astonishing kind concerning the gods. These Sea-Dragons 
shall be esteemed for more than bodily Images and Stone : 
