Page:Under the Sun.djvu/303

Rh he digested flames; the chimæra, shapeless yet deadly; the dread cerastes; the aspic, pretty worm of Nilus, but fatal as lightning and as swift; and the dypsas, whose portentous aspect sufficed to hold the path against an army of Rome’s choicest legions. All these, and many more, are at the lecturer’s service as he travels from age to age of serpent adoration, and turns with skilful hand the different facets of his diamond subject to the listener’s ear. From astronomy, where Serpentarius, baleful constellation, glitters, and refulgent Draco rears his impossible but delightful head, the speaker could run through all the forms of dragon idealism, recalling to his audience as he went on his way, beset with unspeakable monsters, the poems of Greek and of older mythologies, and touching on our own fictions of asp and adder, and other strange reptile things, — defining, however, ah the while, with the bold outlines of a master-hand, the vast scheme of creation, wherein the chain of resemblance is never snapped and like slides into like, until the whole stands revealed complete, a puzzle for the grown-up children of men to put together in a thousand different ways, but one which will never fit in properly, piece to piece, unless the ultimate design be a perfect circle, a serpent with its tail in its mouth, a coil without a break. Fresh, racy morals, too, are to be drawn from the reptile kind; so that, though on an excursion into strange lands, and seeing only the strangest creatures in them, an audience might understand, even in such fantastic company, that the whole of them — the flowers that were snakes, and the birds that were beasts, and many things that were neither one nor the other — fitted in somehow or other, by hook or by crook, by tooth or by nail, into a comprehensive scheme of unity.