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Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley Scanned
and proofed by David Price [email protected]

Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore

Dedication.
MY DEAR MISS GRENFELL,
I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book to you;
excepting of course the opening exhortation (needless enough in your
case) to those who have not yet discovered the value of Natural History.
Accept it as a memorial of pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an
earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to be spent hereafter (perhaps, too,
beyond this life in the nobler world to come), in examining together the
works of our Father in heaven.
Your grateful and faithful brother-in-law,
C. KINGSLEY.
BIDEFORD,
APRIL 24. 1855.

GLAUCUS; OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

You are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks
at some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along think
more than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do
when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one
more in the ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and
sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a "wharf of Lethe," by

which they rot "dull as the oozy weed." You foreknow your doom by
sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a
stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad
sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable reading
of the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench in the
sun, and probably have your umbrella stolen; a purposeless
fine-weather sail in a yacht, accompanied by many ineffectual attempts
to catch a mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your
boys deafen your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing
away at innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die slowly; a sport
which you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot
find in your heart to stop, because "the lads have nothing else to do, and
at all events it keeps them out of the billiard-room;" and after all, and
worst of all, at night a soulless RECHAUFFE of third-rate London
frivolity: this is the life-in-death in which thousands spend the golden
weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh that you are
going to spend them.
Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you the old hymn-distich about
one who
" - finds some mischief still For idle hands to do:"
but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing
worth looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like
this, about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages
and ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture,
and upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so
complex and so wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them,
can only learn how little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that
six weeks' rest, free from the cares of town business and the whirlwind
of town pleasure, could not be better spent than in examining those
wonders a little, instead of wandering up and down like the many, still
wrapt up each in his little world of vanity and self-interest, unconscious
of what and where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth
and sea and sky, and have
"No speculation in those eyes Which they do glare withal"?
Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For
wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever
opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a

very little time and trouble.
Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a "Naturalist:"
and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in the study of
Natural History, though what it