This eBook was produced by David Widger [See the latest corrected and updated text and html PG Editions of the complete 5 volume set at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9755/9755.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9755/pg9755-images.html] THE WORKS OF EDWARD BULWER LYTTON (LORD LYTTON) NIGHT AND MORNING Book IV CHAPTER I. "O that sweet gleam of sunshine on the lake!" WILSON'S _City of the Plague_ If, reader, you have ever looked through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, perhaps you have wondered to yourself how things so terrible have been hitherto unknown to you--you have felt a loathing at the limpid element you hitherto deemed so pure--you have half fancied that you would cease to be a water-drinker; yet, the next day you have forgotten the grim life that started before you, with its countless shapes, in that teeming globule; and, if so tempted by your thirst, you have not shrunk from the lying crystal, although myriads of the horrible Unseen are mangling, devouring, gorging each other in the liquid you so tranquilly imbibe; so is it with that ancestral and master element called Life. Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your patent conscience--when, perhaps for the first time, you look through the glass of science upon one ghastly globule in the waters that heave around, that fill up, with their succulence, the pores of earth, that moisten every atom subject to your eyes or handled by your touch--you are startled and dismayed; you say, mentally, "Can such things be? I never dreamed of this before! I thought what was invisible to me was non- existent in itself--I will remember this dread experiment." The next day the experiment is forgotten.--The Chemist may purify the Globule--can Science make pure the World? Turn we now to the pleasant surface, seen in the whole, broad and fair to the common eye. Who would judge well of God's great designs, if he could look on no drop pendent from the rose-tree, or sparkling in the sun, without the help of his solar microscope? It is ten years after the night on which William Gawtrey perished:--I transport you, reader, to the fairest scenes in England,--scenes consecrated by the only true pastoral poetry we have known to Contemplation and Repose.