So wanes the dew conglobed on rose’s bud;
So melts the ice-drop in the tepid flood:
Thus, too, shall many a shining orb on high
That studs the broad pavilion of the sky,—
Suns and their systems fade, dissolve, and die.”[132]
XI.
NOVEMBER
If we could roam at pleasure over the bottom of the sea, with the privilege of using all our senses as effectually and as comfortably as in the air, we should doubtless see some wonderful things. We might not, indeed, find all the useful and ornamental articles that drowning Clarence saw in his dream, but doubtless we might substitute for them things that he never dreamed of, things that the eye of man was not as yet cultivated to see. What opportunities for enlarging the bounds of science are possessed by the engineers that have been working many hours a day, for years past, at the great Breakwater in that prolific field of marine life, Weymouth Bay!—working in a capacious diving-bell at the bottom of the sea. But there are many reasons why we can expect nothing in the way of natural history from them. Perhaps not one of them has ever been taught to think upon any of the strange forms that might occur, which do not commonly minister to the pocket of man in the market, as anything but mere rubbish not worth a second glance, or something hurtful or nasty to be crushed beneath the heel. Or if, perchance, an observer of nature’s beauties be engaged in such an occupation, his time would be so fully taken up with his urgent duties, as to preclude attention to such amenities. Besides which, the loads of enormous blocks of stone already shot down on the sea-floor, which he is there to arrange and settle, must pretty well have smashed and covered everything which had revelled in dull enjoyment there, before his arrival. Still I fancy I should like to borrow his diving-bell on a holiday, and roam a little beyond those wildernesses of broken stone, picking up treasures here and there such as the scraper of the dredge has never yet been able to gather out of the crevices and crannies of those deep-water rocks.
But such a desire is at present hopeless; and we must be satisfied with such resources as are at our command, thankful that the dredge, and the trawl, and the keer-drag, the fisherman’s deep-sea line, the lobster-pot, and the sounding-lead—are all contributing to our acquaintance with the curious, the uncouth, the wondrous, the beautiful, that lurk far down in profundis.
Let us then go back to the results of our dredging day that we so much enjoyed a few weeks ago. A portion of its produce yet remains in buckets and pans, waiting for a further overhauling; and it will doubtless yield us some objects worthy of an hour or two’s investigation.