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164
Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore
·
Charles Kingsley
13
But
if
you
seek,
reader,
rather
for
pleasure
than
for
wisdom,
you
can
find
it
in
such
studies,
pure
and
undefiled.
Happy,
truly,
is
the
naturalist.
He
has
no
time
for
melancholy
dreams.
The
earth
becomes
to
him
transparent;
everywhere
he
sees
significancies,
harmonies,
laws,
chains
of
cause
and
effect
endlessly
interlinked,
which
draw
him
out
of
the
narrow
sphere
of
self-interest
and
self-pleasing,
into
a
pure
and
wholesome
region
of
solemn
joy
and
wonder.
He
goes
up
some
Snowdon
valley;
to
him
it
is
a
solemn
spot
(though
unnoticed
by
his
companions),
where
the
stag’s-horn
clubmoss
ceases
to
straggle
across
the
turf,
and
the
tufted
alpine
clubmoss
takes
its
place:
for
he
is
now
in
a
new
world;
a
region
whose
climate
is
eternally
influenced
by
some
fresh
law
(after
which
he
vainly
guesses
with
a
sigh
at
his
own
ignorance),
which
renders
life
impossible
to
one
species,
possible
to
another.
And
it
is
a
still
more
solemn
thought
to
him,
that
it
was
not
always
so;
that
æons
and
ages
back,
that
rock
which
he
passed
a
thousand
feet
below
was
fringed,
not
as
now
with
fern
and
blue
bugle,
and
white
bramble-flowers,
but
perhaps
with
the
alp-rose
and
the
“gemsen-kraut”
of
Mont
Blanc,
at
least
with
Alpine
Saxifrages
which
have
now
retreated
a
thousand
feet
up
the
mountain
side,
and
with
the
blue
Snow-Gentian,
and
the
Canadian
Sedum,
which
have
all
but
vanished
out
of
the
British
Isles.
And
what
is
it
which
tells
him
that
strange
story?
Yon
smooth
and
rounded
surface
of
rock,
polished,
remark,
across
the
strata
and
against
the
grain;
and
furrowed
here
and
there,
as
if
by
iron
talons,
with
long
parallel
scratches.
It
was
the
crawling
of
a
glacier
which
polished
that
rock-face;
the
stones
fallen
from
Snowdon
peak
into
the
half-liquid
lake
of
ice
above,
which
ploughed
those
furrows.
Æons
and
æons
ago,
before
the
time
when
Adam
first
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