Page images
PDF
EPUB

When day down the eastern way has come. 'Tis clear as the moon (by the argument drawn From Design) that the world should retire at dawn.

"Day kills. The leaf and the laborer breathe

Death in the sun, the cities seethe,

The mortal black marshes bubble with heat

And puff up pestilence; nothing is sweet
Has to do with the sun: even virtue will taint
(Philosophers say) and manhood grow faint
In the lands where the villainous sun has sway
Through the livelong drag of the dreadful day.

[ocr errors]

now

"What Eden but noon light stares it tame,
Shadowless, brazen, forsaken of shame ?
For the sun tells lies on the landscape
Reports me the what, unrelieved with the how--
As messengers lie, with the facts alone,
Delivering the word and withholding the tone.

“But oh, the sweetness, and oh, the light

Of the high-fastidious night!

Oh, to awake with the wise old stars

The cultured, the careful, the Chesterfield stars,

That wink at the workaday fact of crime,

And shine so rich through the ruins of time

That Baalbec is finer than London; oh,

To sit on the bough that zigzags low

By the woodland pool,

And loudly laugh at man, the fool

That vows to the vulgar sun; oh, rare,

To wheel from the wood to the window where

A day-worn sleeper is dreaming of care,

And perch on the sill and straightly stare
Through his visions; rare, to sail

Aslant with the hill and acurve with the vale
To flit down the shadow-shot-with-gleam,
Betwixt hanging leaves and starlit stream,
Hither, thither, to and fro,
Silent, aimless, dayless, slow

(Aimless? Field mice? True, they're slain,
But the night philosophy hoots at pain,
Grips, eats quick, and drops the bones
In the water beneath the bough, nor moans
At the death life feeds on). Robin, pray
Come away, come away

To the cultus of night. Abandon the day.
Have more to think and have less to say.

[ocr errors]

And cannot you walk now? Bah, don't hop! Stop!
Look at the owl, scarce seen, scarce heard,

Oh irritant, iterant, maddening bird!"

- From "The Poems of Sidney Lanier," by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers.

MY FIRST GEOLOGICAL TRIP.

BY SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE.

We started off about noon, a goodly band of some eight or nine striplings, with two or three hammers and a few pence amongst us. We arrived at length at the limestone quarries. They had been opened along the slope of a gentle declivity. My companions rushed down the slope with a shout of triumph. For myself, I lingered a moment

on the top. With just a tinge of sadness in the thought, I felt that, though striking and picturesque beyond anything of the kind I had ever seen, this cavern was, after all, only a piece of human handiwork.

The heaps of rubbish around me, with the smoking kilns at one end and the clanking engine at the other, had no connection with beings of another world, but told only too plainly of ingenious, indefatigable man. The spell was broken forever, and as it fell to pieces I darted down the slope and rejoined my comrades.

They had already entered a cave, which was certainly vast and gloomy enough for whole legions of gnomes. Not a vestige of vegetation could we see. Away it stretched to the right and to the left in long vistas of gloom, broken by the light which, entering from other openings along the hillside, fell here and there on some hoary pillar, and finally vanished into the shade.

"But where are the petrified forests and fishes?" cried one of the party.

"Here!" "Here!" was shouted in reply from the top of the bank.

We made for the heap of broken stones whence the voices had come, and there, truly, on every block and every fragment fossils met our eye, sometimes so thickly grouped together that we could barely see the stone on which they lay. I bent over the mound, and the first fragment that turned up (my first-found fossil) was the one that excited the deepest interest.

The commander-in-chief of the excursion, who was regarded (perhaps as much from his bodily stature as for any other reason) an authority on these questions, pronounced my treasure-trove to be, unmistakably, a fish.

True, it seemed to lack head and tail and fins; the liveliest fancy amongst us hesitated as to which marks were the scales; and in after years I learned that it was really a vegetable the seed-cone or catkin of a large extinct kind of club-moss; but, in the meantime, Tom had declared it to be a fish, and a fish it must assuredly be.

[ocr errors]

Like other schoolboys, I had, of course, had my lesson on geology in the usual meager cut-and-dried form in which physical science was then taught in our schools. I could repeat a "Table of Formations," and remembered the pictures of some uncouth monsters on the pages of our text-books-one with goggle eyes, no neck, and a preposterous tail; another with an unwieldy body and no tail at all, for which defect I had endeavored to compensate by inserting a long pipe into its mouth, receiving from our master (Ironsides, we called him) a hearty rap across the knuckles as a recompense.

But the notion that these pictures were the representation of actual, though now extinct, monsters; that the statements which seemed so dry and unintelligible in print were such as could be actually verified by our own eyes in nature; that, beneath and beyond the present creation, there lay around us the memorials of other creations not less glorious, and infinitely older, than our books or our teachers taught us, and that these memorials could be learned by looking at nature for ourselves -- all this was strange to me. It came now for the first time like a new revelation—one that has gladdened my life ever since.

We worked on industriously at the rubbish heap, and found an untold sum of wonders. To our imagination, the plants, insects, shells, and fishes of our rambles met

us again in the rock. There was little that some one of the party could not explain, and thus our limestone became a more extraordinary gathering of organic remains, I will venture to say, than ever perturbed the brain of a geologist.

It did not occur at the time to any of us to inquire why a perch came to be embalmed among ivy and rose leaves; why a seashore whelk lay entwined in the folds of a butterfly; or why a beetle should seem to have been doing his utmost to dance a pirouette round the tooth of a fish.

All these questions came to be asked afterward, and then I saw how erroneous were my boyish identifications. But knowing little of the subject, I believed everything, and with implicit faith piled up dragon flies, ferns, fishes, beetle cases, violets, seaweeds, and shells.

Then came the packing up. Each had amassed a pile of specimens well-nigh as large as himself, and it was of course impossible to carry everything away. A rapid

selection had therefore to be made. And oh! with how much reluctance were we compelled to relinquish many of the stones, the discovery whereof had made the opposite cavern ring again with our jubilee!

Not one of us had provided himself with a bag, and so we stowed away the treasures in our pockets. Surely practical geometry offers not a more perplexing problem than to gauge the capacity of these parts of a schoolboy's dress. We loaded ourselves to the full, and marched along with the fossils crowded into every available

corner.

Such was my first geological excursion—a simple event enough, and yet the turning point in a life. Little

« PreviousContinue »