"Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep."

There may lie all the horrors that Schiller's diver encountered--the
frightful Molch, and that worst of all, to which he gives no name, which
came creeping with a hundred knots at once; but here are only the gracious
rainbow-woven shells, an evanescent jelly or two, and the queer baby-crabs
that crawl out from the holes of the bordering rocks. What awful gradations
of gentleness lead from such as these down to those cabins where wallow
the inventions of Nature's infancy, when, like a child of untutored
imagination, she drew on the slate of her fancy creations in which flitting
shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the shuddering, gruesome horror.
The sweet sun and air, the hand of man, and the growth of the ages, have
all but swept such from the upper plains of the earth. What hunter's bow
has twanged, what adventurer's rifle has cracked in those leagues of
mountain-waste, vaster than all the upper world can show, where the beasts
of the ocean "graze the sea-weed, their pasture"! Diana of the silver bow
herself, when she descends into the interlunar caves of hell, sends no such
monsters fleeing from her spells. Yet if such there be, such horrors too
must lie in the undiscovered caves of man's nature, of which all this outer
world is but a typical analysis. By equally slow gradations may the inner
eye descend from the truth of a Cordelia to the falsehood of an Iago. As
these golden sands slope from the sunlight into the wallowing abyss of
darkness, even so from the love of the child to his holy mother slopes the
inclined plane of humanity to the hell of the sensualist. "But with one
difference in the moral world," I said aloud, as I paced up and down on the
shimmering margin, "that everywhere in the scale the eye of the all-seeing
Father can detect the first quiver of the eyelid that would raise itself
heavenward, responsive to his waking spirit." I lifted my eyes in the
relief of the thought, and saw how the sun of the autumn hung above the