Konx Om Pax

36 KONX OM PAX earth-rise! How wonderful are the dark shadows on yon silver globe! They are like a hare, like a dog, like a bally great rabbit with its tail in its mouth. One would say a young virgin in pink sandals with her hair in curl papers.” (For the man in the moon has read Maeterlinck and the divine Oscar.) The Angel replied: “0 Man in the Moon, this is an error which is spoken concerning silver globes, hares, dogs, rabbits, Virgins, pink slippers, and the ubiquitous products of the immortal Hinde. Let us examine more closely l” Tucking forthwith the Man under his wing, the Angel flew incontinently earthward. “The globe is bigger than I thought,” said the Man. “ Curious illu sion: it is a concave bowl of blue,” said the Man. “Nay! but it is a vast plain; and there go the ships; no doubt, were it only August I should see that great Leviathan, whom Thou (addressing the Almighty) hast made to play therein. But the silly season is long past.” And he cursed it for a barren ocean. Luckily he was not Christ, or Mr. Swinburne would have found it difficult to find similes for everything he writes about; from Blake and Byron to Dekker, Dickens, Dionysius, Dio Chrysostom, and Diogenes. Then said the Man: “It is not blue but gray; it is far-resounding and makes an anarithmical gelasm; it is salt; it is wet; it is a generator of ozone, or my olfactory organs are deceived—and oh! but my bowels are stirred within me like the young lady in the Song of Solomon when the young gentleman— ” “ Hush!” said the Angel. “ All this is delusion; examine more closely!” “It is a universe of living things ! ” exclaimed the Man, for it was Thames Water that he examined through the Angel’s 90 h.-p. Mercedes Pocket Microscope. “And oh! if God thought that they were very good, what peculiar tastes He must have!” “Look more closely!” said the Angel, hand ing him a pair of Spectacles from the firm of Kelvin, Boscovitch, Son, and Haeckel. “ Nothing is now visible,” said the Man, “but a purely geometrical conception of the mind, and a self-contradictory one at that.” “ Go back to the moon,” said the Angel, throwing him thither with the supple yet powerful jerk which had won him the Cricket Ball