The wide ranges of the pearl's modest worth, exalted purity, and singular beauty, yet remain to illustrate the thoughts of future genius. Imagination has not yet brooded often over the humble and distorted creatures, whose gnarled and twisted forms, lying among their myriad shapely brethren are evidence of a precious sacrifice of self to leave a heritage of beauty; nor dreamed of the silent acres under turbulent waters where the gem, one day to adorn the neck of beauty or the diadem of royalty, is reared. What play for imagination lies between the birth of this creation of one of the humblest of Earth's creatures, and the high placement to which it rises as soon as it is discovered.
There are deserted wastes of sand and water under torrid skies, populated almost momentarily with teeming multitudes whose jargon fills the former silences with a world wide medley of tongues. As in a dream, the tremulous air is stirred by the struggling movement of naked slaves, turbanned orientals, men from all lands of the occident, the moving throng weaving constantly new patterns from the variegated colors and fantastic costumes of living threads. And everywhere, beneath the prosaic motion of labor and trading, is the quiver of hope, the excitement of the gambler; the poetry of human passions, unseen, but felt.
There are in unfrequented seas, where some lonely atoll draws its circle round a still lagoon, treasures greater than its cargo and the stately ship sailing heedless by. So like the undiscovered pearls of the ocean's bed, the universe holds an exhaustless store of thoughts and truths for those who come after the discoverers of this age. Thought runs in grooves and the grooves outlast many generations; scarcely in a cycle does one look over the ridge and find a species foreign to the rut.
Within the walls which the past builds for the present it is more easy to adopt than to bring forth, and so the ancient metaphors, age after age, are with some changes of raiment thrown back upon the world again. But in this new era of acquisition, while this sea-gem is again lifted to the serene heights of most exalted favor, perhaps it will not only shine upon the persons of the fair, but adorn, in simile and metaphor as beautiful as the old, the pages of romance and poetry.
GLOSSARY
Abalone.—Name given on the California coast and in the United States to the Haliotis.
Ball-Pearl.—Name given to round pearls by pearlers at the inland fisheries of the United States.
Baroque.—A pearly formation of irregular shape.