e
roadside is a magic mirror, and transforms all that it encloses. There
is a vastness of depth, too, in that concave hemisphere, through
which the vision sinks like a falling star, that excites and fills the
imagination. What it shows is only a shadow, but all things seen are
mere shadows painted on the retina, and you have, at such times,
a realistic sense of the beautiful and bold imagery which calls a
favorite fountain of the East the Eye of the Desert.

The alluring softness of this mimic world increases to sublimity when,
instead of some rocky basin, dripping with mossy emeralds and coral
berries, you look upon the deep crystalline sea. Each mates to its
kind. This does not gather its imagery from gray, mossy rock or
pendent leaf or flower, but draws into its enfolding arms the wide
vault of the cerulean sky. The richness of the majestic azure is
deepened by that magnificent marriage. The pale blue is darkened to
violet. Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous
liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights
and cross-lights. As you look upon those endless pastures thought is
quickened with the conception of their innumerable phases of vitality.
The floating weed, whose meshes measure the spaces of continents and
archipelagoes, is everywhere instinct with animal and vegetable life.
The builder coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues
and tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of
length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents with
bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the sea.
Animate flowers--sea-nettles, sea anemones, plumularia, campanularia,
hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria, bryozoa--people the great waters.
Sea-urchins, star-fish, sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle
and thrive with ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms
that shine like stars cling to every weed; glimmering animalcules,
phosphorescent medusae, the very deep itself is vivid with sparkle
and corruscation of electric fire. So through every scale, from the
zoophyte to the warm-blooded whale, the sea teems with life, out of
which fewer links have been dropped than from sub-aerial life. It is a
matter for curious speculation that the missing species belong not to
the lower subsidiary genera, as in terrene animals, but to the
highest types of marine life. In the quarries of Lyme Regis, among the
accumulations of a sea