The beauty of the Serpent--Emerson on ideal forms--Michelet's thoughts on the viper's head--Unique characters of the Serpent--The monkey's horror of Snakes--The Serpent protected by superstition--Human defencelessness against its subtle powers--Dubufe's picture of the Fall of Man. In the accompanying picture, a medal of the ancient city of Tyre, two of the most beautiful forms of nature are brought together,--the Serpent and the Egg. Mr. D. R. Hay has shown the endless extent to which the oval arches have been reproduced in the ceramic arts of antiquity; and the same sense of symmetry which made the Greek vase a combination of Eggs prevails in the charm which the same graceful outline possesses wherever suggested,--as in curves of the swan, crescent of the moon, the elongated shell,--on which Aphrodite may well be poised, since the same contours find their consummate expression in the flowing lines attaining their repose in the perfect form of woman. The Serpent--model of the 'line of grace and beauty'--has had an even larger fascination for the eye of the artist and the poet. It is the one active form in nature which cannot be ungraceful, and to estimate the extent of its use in decoration is impossible, because all undulating and coiling lines are necessarily serpent forms. But in addition to the perfections of this form--which fulfil all the ascent of forms in Swedenborg's mystical morphology, circular, spiral, perpetual-circular, vortical, celestial--the Serpent bears on it, as it were, gems of the underworld that seem to find their counterpart in galaxies. One must conclude that Serpent-worship is mainly founded in fear. The sacrifices offered to that animal are alone sufficient to prove this. But as it is certain that the Serpent appears in symbolism and poetry in many ways which have little or no relation to its terrors, we may well doubt whether it may not have had a career in the human imagination previous to either of the results of its reign of terror,--worship and execration. It is the theory of Pestalozzi that every child is born an artist, and through its pictorial sense must be led on its first steps of education. The infant world displayed also in its selection of sacred trees and animals a profound appreciation of beauty. The myths in which the Serpent is represented as kakodemon refer rather to its natural history than to its appearance; and even when its natural history came to be observed, there was--there now is--such a wide discrepancy between its physiology and its functions, also between its intrinsic characters and their relation to man, that we can only accept its various aspects in mythology without attempting to trace their relative precedence in time. The past may in this case be best interpreted by the present. How different now to wise and observant men are the suggestions of this exceptional form in nature! Let us read a passage concerning it from Ralph Waldo Emerson:--