amorphous creatures glided about in the seas, and vast sea-worms, or
centipedal asps, the parents of modern krakens and sea-serpents,
doubtless, accompanied them. There stood that unfinished world reeking
with charcoal fumes, its soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation
efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic
atmosphere. Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there
motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid
reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes
were not,--nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending,
as from a vast charcoal brazier. No lark or linnet or redbreast or
mocking-bird could live, much less warble, in those carbonic times. The
world, like a Mississippi steamer, was coaling, with an eye to the
needs of its future biped passengers. The embryotic earth was then
truly a Niflheim, or Mistland,--a dun, fuming region. Those were the
days, perhaps, when Nox reigned, and the great mundane egg was hatching
in the oven-like heat, from which the winged boy Eros leaped forth,
"his back glittering with golden plumes, and swift as eddying air." We
have it on good authority, that the Adirondack Mountains of New York,
and the Grampian Hills of Scotland, where Norval was to feed his
flocks, had already upheaved their bare backs from the boiling caldrons
of the sea, thus stealing a march on the Alps and many other more
famous mountains.

How opposite and remote from each other are the mythologic ages and the
nineteenth century! The critical and scientific spirit of the one is in
strange contrast with the credulous, blindly reverent spirit of the
other. Mythology delegated the government of the world to inferior
deities, the subjects of an omnipotent Fate or Necessity; while, to
show how extremes meet, mere science delegates it to chemical and
physiological agencies, and ends, like the mythic cosmogonies, in some