Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

Mystery inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and untrodden forests, only that some few individuals of the Western races might, in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here and there of the boundless realms of beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if man be the centre and the object of their existence; explicable enough to him who believes that God has created all things for Himself, and rejoices in His own handiwork, and that the material universe is, as the wise man says, “A platform whereon His Eternal Spirit sports and makes melody.” Of all the blessings which the study of nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this: that the further he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of Nature’s ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, “The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day.”