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"O that sweet gleam of sunshine on the lake!"
WILSON'S City of the Plague
If, reader, you have ever looked through a solar microscope at themonsters in a drop of water, perhaps you have wondered to yourself howthings so terrible have been hitherto unknown to you—you have felt aloathing at the limpid element you hitherto deemed so pure—you have halffancied that you would cease to be a water-drinker; yet, the next day youhave forgotten the grim life that started before you, with its countlessshapes, in that teeming globule; and, if so tempted by your thirst, youhave not shrunk from the lying crystal, although myriads of the horribleUnseen are mangling, devouring, gorging each other in the liquid you sotranquilly imbibe; so is it with that ancestral and master element calledLife. Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of yourpatent conscience—when, perhaps for the first time, you look through theglass of science upon one ghastly globule in the waters that heavearound, that fill up, with their succulence, the pores of earth, thatmoisten every atom subject to your eyes or handled by your touch—you arestartled and dismayed; you say, mentally, "Can such things be? I neverdreamed of this before! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself—I will remember this dread experiment." The next daythe experiment is forgotten.—The Chemist may purify the Globule—canScience make pure the World?
Turn we now to the pleasant surface, seen in the whole, broad and fair tothe common eye. Who would judge well of God's great designs, if he couldlook on no drop pendent from the rose-tree, or sparkling in the sun,without the help of his solar microscope?
It is ten years after the night on which William Gawtrey perished:—Itransport you, reader, to the fairest scenes in England,—scenesconsecrated by the only true pastoral poetry we have known toContemplation and Repose.
Autumn had begun to tinge the foliage on the banks of Winandermere. Ithad been a summer of unusual warmth and beauty; and if that year you hadvisited the English lakes, you might, from time to time, amidst thegroups of happy idlers you encountered, have singled out two persons forinterest, or, perhaps, for envy. Two who might have seemed to you inpeculiar harmony with those serene and soft retreats, both young—bothbeautiful. Lovers you would have guessed them to be; but such lovers asFletcher might have placed under the care of his "Holy Shepherdess"—forms that might have reclined by
"The virtuous well, about whose flowery banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds
By the pale moonshine."
For in the love of those persons there seemed a purity and innocence thatsuited well their youth and the character of their beauty. Perhaps,indeed, on the girl's side, love sprung rather from those affectionswhich the spring of li