Enceladus

“ The stars came out well, and no sooner had he got hold of Saturn than a sixth satellite stood revealed to view! Its “younger brother” was detected September 17th; and the two could be seen, on favourable opportunities, threading their way, like beads of light, along the lucid line of the almost vanished ring. Herschel named them Enceladus and Mimas, and found, on looking up his former observations of Saturn, that Enceladus, the exterior and brighter object, had been unmistakably seen with the twenty-foot, August 19th, 1787. Mimas is a very delicate test of instrumental perfection. ”

“ Her, one saith, Mother Earth, when stung by wrath against the gods, bore last sister to Coeus and Enceladus, fleet-footed and swift of wing, ominous, awful, vast; for every feather on her body is a waking eye beneath, wonderful to tell, and a tongue, and as many loud lips and straining ears. By night she flits between sky and land, shrilling through the dusk, and droops not her lids in sweet slumber; in daylight she sits on guard upon tall towers or the ridge of the house-roof, and makes great cities afraid; obstinate in perverseness and forgery no less than messenger of truth. ”

“ The resistance of Enceladus and the Giants, themselves rebels against an order already established, would have been dealt with summarily, and the poem would have closed with a description of the new age which had been inaugurated by the triumph of the Olympians, and, in particular, of Apollo the god of light and song.'
The central idea, then, of the poem is that the new age triumphs over the old by virtue of its acknowledged superiority—that intellectual supremacy makes physical force feel its power and yield. ”

“ A disanointing poison: so that Thea,
Affrighted, kept her still, and let him pass
First onwards in, among the fallen tribe. ⁠100
As with us mortal men, the laden heart
Is persecuted more, and fever'd more,
When it is nighing to the mournful house
Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise;
So Saturn, as he walk'd into the midst,
Felt faint, and would have sunk among the rest,
But that he met Enceladus's eye,
Whose mightiness, and awe of him, at once
Came like an inspiration; and he shouted,
"Titans, behold your God!" at which some groan'd; ⁠110
Some started on their feet; some also shouted ”

“ It is the bold fancy of an imaginative thinker, [4] that the material forces which lie beneath external nature are conscious of being bound down and confined under the crust of the earth, like the giant Enceladus under Mt. ”

“ The open sea is, of course, familiar to us all, [58] and yet its apparent boundlessness and immeasurable depth are ever new as the most immense thing in our knowledge—the sky belonging rather to the realm of the intangible. Mid-ocean always makes me feel the infinite continuity of time, the omnipresence of natural law, and a stimulus to greater harmony with its workings. Nowhere else are my ‘cosmic emotions’ so stirred. One gets something of the same impression on land wherever one can mark the ceaseless rising, pausing, and falling of the tide, under the mysterious governance of the moon. ”

“ This water was bitterly salt and joined another sea on the other side of the Martian continent. Yet it had a pronounced flow against us eastward, this tide running for three spring months and being followed, I learned, as ocean temperatures varied, by a flow in the opposite direction throughout the summer.
Just at present the current was so strong eastwards, the moisture beaded upon my rowers' tawny hides as they struggled against it, and their melancholy song dawdled in "linked sweetness long drawn out," while the swing of their oars grew longer and longer. ”

“ Our Creator cast them using a colossal mold that time has gradually made smaller. With its untold depths, couldn’t the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn’t the heart of the ocean hide the last-remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia? ”

“ The winds were instructed to gather together the rain clouds over the earth. Neptune let loose the waves of the sea, bidding them rise, overflow, and deluge the land. No sooner had the gods spoken, than the elements obeyed: the winds blew; the rain fell in torrents; lakes, seas, rivers, and oceans broke their bonds; and terrified mortals, forgetting their petty quarrels in a common impulse to flee from the death which threatened them, climbed the highest mountains, clung to uprooted trees, and even took refuge in the light skiffs they had constructed in happier days. ”

“ For days the Neptun could be seen moving smoothly up and down the sombre face of the shore, or hanging about with a watchful air near the silvery breaks of broad estuaries, under the great luminous sky never softened, never veiled, and flooding the earth with the everlasting sunshine of the tropics—that sunshine which, in its unbroken splendour, oppresses the soul with an inexpressible melancholy more intimate, more penetrating, more profound than the grey sadness of the northern mists. ”

“ Another shift in our course rapidly carried us out of the shadow of the earth and into the all pervading sunshine. Then the great planet beneath us hung unspeakable in its beauty. The outlines of several of the continents were clearly discernible on its surface, streaked and spotted with delicate shades of varying color, and the sunlight flashed and glowed in long lanes across the convex surface of the oceans. Parallel with the Equator and along the regions of the ever blowing trade winds, were vast belts of clouds, gorgeous with crimson and purple as the sunlight fell upon them. ”

“ However calm the sea without, there is no rest for these swells and those rocks; they lash and are lashed, even when the outer ocean is most at peace with itself. On the oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight. ”

“ The ocean is formed from the rains which descend from heaven and the streams which flow from earth. By making Oceanus therefore the offspring of Uranus and Gæa, the ancients, if we take this notion in its literal sense, merely assert that the ocean is produced by the combined influence of heaven and earth, whilst at the same time their fervid and poetical imagination led them to see in this, as in all manifestations of the powers of nature, an actual, tangible divinity. ”

“ For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. ”

“ While mangled body lay in ocean prone.
Above the horrid sights and awful fear
Dark waters rolled, mud-laden many a year.
At dawn high crested waves, victorious,
Exulted over Mu long glorious!
Of what she was, some vestige yet may rest
In depth profound ’neath Ocean’s heaving breast.
Perchance, when ages shall have fled, that land,
Stripped bare—again unable to withstand
Volcanic force, that will her life-springs start—
May rise, and thus reborn again take part
On this small globe, mere cosmic spark! yet still
A universe whose powers await man’s will. ”

“ But so it was from the beginning;—and this planet was not made for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor ”

“ Murray to be of cosmic origin—in fact, to be the dust of meteorites, which in the course of ages have fallen on the ocean. Such particles no doubt occur over the whole surface of the earth, but on land they soon oxidize, and in shallow water they are covered up by other deposits. Another interesting result of recent deep-sea explorations has been to show that the depths of the ocean are no mere barren solitudes, as was until recent years confidently believed, but, on the contrary, present us many remarkable forms of life. ”

“ If the great aerial ocean which surrounds the earth be thus charged with the rudiments of life, floating continually amidst the atoms of dust we see twinkling in a sunbeam, and ever ready to return to life as soon as they find a matrix adapted to their development, we have in these conditions of the very air we breathe a system of provisions for the almost infinite dissemination of life throughout the fluids of the present Earth ”

“ Just fancy that Providence had run the Equator through Europe, instead of through the Pacific, or wherever it is now. If the Equator happened to be located in the Old World, each of the kings we have seen, and more to be heard from, would be itching and grabbing for it, pouring out their subjects' blood like water (saving their own, of course) to get hold of the blamed thing. ”

“ Oceanus and Neptune.
The myths of the sea comprise, of course, Oceanus and Neptune (the earth-shaker) , whose name is connected with such words as “potent” and “despot,” and whose “green hair circles all the earth.” We are further informed that he loves the earth (Ceres) , whom he embraces, and that he marries the graceful undulating Amphitrite, whose gliding charms appeal to him. Neptune’s palace is beneath the deep waters near Greece, and he is said to ride about his realm in a swift chariot drawn by golden or white maned steeds. ”

“ Tides too, it has been argued, would be produced in the fluid matter, however deeply seated, through the influence of the sun and moon, and which tides would necessarily occasion such oscillatory and expansive movements as astronomy has neither noticed nor accounted for. Again, the supposition of a central heat of the earth, prevailing from the beginning and through all the phases of its history, implies that its cooling is still going on; and that, in consequence, a contraction in the mass or bulk of the earth will follow the law observed by all other bodies in parting with their heat. ”

“ It appears from the marine shells found on the tops of the highest mountains, and in almost every part of the globe, that immense continents have been elevated above the ocean, which must have which must have engulphed others. Such a catastrophe would be occasioned by a variation in the position of the axis of rotation on the surface of the earth; for the seas ending to the new equator would leave some portions of the globe, and overwhelm others. ”

“ The winds were light, and, as usual near the line, there was a tremendous swell upon the ocean, which rose in long and slowly-heaving hills, without foam or ripple—smooth, glassy, and without sound.
On a lovely night, when the ocean seemed to sleep in the moonshine, we crossed the equator.
The Eugenie was running with the lee clews eased off—i.e., with a flowing sheet—when Father Neptune came on board, and the usual unpleasant pranks were played on those who had never passed the girdle of the world before. ”

“ But now we know that the sea teems with living beings as densely as do the fresh waters or the air. In it began the life of the globe, for the fossil records of the rocks show that the first animals lived in the ocean, and that ages passed before any of them began to people the newly formed lands and breathe the atmosphere instead of the air in the water; and, abundant as oceanic life now is, the paleozoic seas held immensely greater hordes, of which many forms were giants as compared with those of our day. Some of the old straight chambered shells were twelve feet long ”

“ For this Water of ours, in Jupiter or Saturn, would be frozen up instantly by reason of the vast distance of the Sun. Every Planet therefore must have its Waters of such a temper, as to be proportioned to its Heat: Jupiter’s and Saturn’s must be of such a Nature as not to be liable to Frost; and Venus’s and Mercury’s of such, as not to be easily evaporated by the Sun. ”

“ The great astronomer Kepler, for instance, in seeking to account for the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, depicted the earth as a living monster, the earth animal, whose whalelike mode of breathing occasioned the rise and fall of the ocean in recurring periods of sleeping and waking, dependent on solar time. ”

“ Oceanus or Okeanos, in the Greek mythology the great world-stream which surrounds the whole earth, and is the parent source of all seas and streams, presided over by a Titan, the husband of Tethys, and the father of all river-gods and water-nymphs. He is the all-father of the world, as his wife is the all-mother, and the pair occupy a palace apart on the extreme verge of the world. ”

“ There seem to be very good reasons for not believing that the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, acting alone, produced the glacial cold. If that were the case, then whenever the eccentricity was great we should have a Glacial Age. Now, at some period of time during the long-extended Tertiary Age we are certain the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit became very great, much more so, in fact, than that which is supposed to have produced the cold of the Quaternary Age. ”