10 15 OFF ROUGH POINT EMMA LAZARUS We sat at twilight nigh the sea, We heard the billows crack and plunge, Earth sucked the vapors like a sponge, Closer the woof of white mist drew, Before, behind, beside. How could that phantom moon break through, Above that shrouded tide? The roaring waters filled the ear, A white blank foiled the sight. Close-gathering shadows near, more near, O friends who passed unseen, unknown! Still stand we on a rock alone, Walled round by mystery. GLOSSARY. Uncannily; woof; foiled. STUDY. What scene is brought before you in the first four stanzas? What one fact in the scene dominates it all? Does line 7 tell you that the fog hangs low upon the earth, or that it is lightly dispersed in air? Why call the night blind and awful (1. 16)? What impression does it give the speaker of her relation to other beings in the world? Do the last two lines have reference to the scene on the seashore alone, or do they suggest that in a sense we are always isolated from others? What is meant by "mystery" in line 20? MY FIRST GEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 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 among us, and no need to be home before dusk. An October sun shone merrily out upon us; the fields, bared of their leaves, 5 had begun to be again laid under the plow, and long lines of rich brown loam alternated with bands of yellow stubble, up and down which toiled many a team of steaming horses. The neighboring woods, gorgeous in their tints of green, gold, and russet, sent forth clouds of rooks, whose noisy jangle, borne onward by 10 the breeze, and mingling with the drone of the bee and the carol of the lark, grew mellow in the distance, as the cadence of a faroff hymn. We were too young to analyze the landscape, but not too young to find in every feature of it the intensest enjoyment. Moreover, our path lay through a district rich in historic 15 associations. Watch-peels, castles, and towers looked out upon us as we walked, each with its traditionary tales, the recital of which formed one of our chief delights. Or if a castle lacked its story, our invention easily supplied the defect. And thus every part of the way came to be memorable in our eyes for some 20 thrilling event real or imaginary-battles, stern and bloody, fierce encounters in single combat, strange weird doings of antique wizards, and marvelous achievements of steel-clad knights, who rambled restlessly through the world to deliver imprisoned maidens. Thus beguiled the four miles seemed to shrink into one, and 25 we arrived at length at the quarries. They had been opened, I found, along the slope of a gentle declivity. At the north end stood the kilns where the lime was burned, the white smoke from which we used to see some miles away. About a quarter of a mile to the south lay the workings where my comrades had seen 30 the subterranean men; and there too stood the engine that drew up the wagons and pumped out the water. Between the engine and the kilns the hillside had all been mined and exhausted; the quarrymen having gradually excavated their way southwards to where we saw the smoking chimney of the engine house. We made for a point midway in the excavations; and great indeed 35 was our delight, on climbing a long bank of grass-grown rubbish, to see below us a green hollow, and beyond it a wall of rock, in the center of which yawned a dark cavern, plunging away into the hill far from the light of day. My companions rushed down the slope with a shout of triumph. For myself, I lingered a 40 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 the one end and the clanking engine at the 45 other, had no connection with beings of another world, but told only too plainly of ingenious, indefatigable man. The spell was broken at once and forever, and as it fell to pieces, I darted down the slope and rejoined my comrades. They had already entered the cave, which was certainly vast 50 and gloomy enough for whole legions of gnomes. The roof,, steep as that of a house, sloped rapidly into the hillside beneath a murky sheet of water, and was supported by pillars of wide girth, some of which had a third of their height, or more, concealed by the lake, so that the cavern, with its inclined roof and 55 pillars, half sunk in the water, looked as though it had been rent and submerged by some old earthquake. Not a vestige of vegetation could we see save, near the entrance, some dwarfed scolopendriums and pale patches of moss. Not an insect, nor indeed any living thing seemed ever to venture down into this dreary 60 den. Away it stretched to the right hand and the left, in long withdrawing vistas of gloom, broken, as we could faintly see, by the light which, entering from other openings along the hillside, fell here and there along some hoary pillar, and finally vanished into the shade. It is needless to recall what achievements we performed; how, with true boyish hardihood, we essayed to climb the pillars, or 65 crept along the ledges of rock that overhung the murky water, to let a ponderous stone fall plump into the depths, and mark 70 how long the bubbles continued to rise gurgling to the surface, and how long the reverberations of the plunge came floating back to us from the far-off recesses of the cave. Enough, that, having satisfied our souls with the wonders below ground, we set out to explore those above. 75 "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 by two of the ringleaders on the previous Saturday. We made for the heap of broken stones whence the voices had come, and there, truly, on every block and every fragment 80 the 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 one that excited the deepest interest. The commander-in-chief of the first excursion, who was regarded (per85 haps as much from his bodily stature as for any other reason) an authority on these questions, pronounced my treasure-trove to be, unmistakably and unequivocally, a fish. True, it seemed to lack head and tail and fins; the liveliest fancy amongst us hesitated as to which were the scales; and in after years I learned 90 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. The halo that broke forth from the Wizard's tomb when William of Deloraine and the Monk of St. Mary's heaved at midnight the 95 ponderous stone was surely not brighter, certainly not so benign in its results, as the light that now seemed to stream into my whole being, as I disinterred from their stony folds these wondrous relics. Like other schoolboys, I had, of course, had my lessons on geology in the usual meager, cut-and-dry form in which 100 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 textbooks one with goggle eyes, no neck, and a preposterous tail; another with an unwieldy body, and no tail at all, for which latter defect I had endeavored to compensate by inserting a long pipe into his mouth, receiving 105 from our master (Ironsides, we called him) a hearty rap across the knuckles, as a recompense for my attention to the creature's comfort. But the notion that these pictures were the representations of actual, though now extinct monsters, that the matter-offact details of our textbooks really symbolized living truths, and 110 were not invented solely to distract the brains and endanger the palms of schoolboys; nay, 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, in the glories of which we reveled, there lay 115 around us the memorials of other creations not less glorious, and infinitely older, and thus that more, immensely more, than our books and our teachers taught us 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 120 my life ever since. We worked on industriously at the rubbish heap, and found an untold sum of wonders. The human mind in its earlier stages dwells on resemblances, rather than on differences. We identified what we found in the stones with that to which it most nearly 125 approached in existing nature, and though many an organism turned up to which we could think of no analogue, we took no trouble to discriminate wherein it differed from others. Hence to our imagination, the plants, insects, shells, and fishes of our rambles met us again in the rock. There was little that some 130 one of the party could not explain, and thus our limestone became a more extraordinary conglomeration 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 135 lay entwined in the arms of a butterfly; or why a beetle should seem to have been doing his utmost to dance a pirouette round |
