f the public
buildings of the city, and scared away the amazed inhabitants, the house
now inhabited by Glaucus had been terribly shattered. The possessors
deserted it for many days; on their return they cleared away the ruins
which encumbered the viridarium, and found still the tortoise, unharmed
and unconscious of the surrounding destruction. It seemed to bear a
charmed life in its languid blood and imperceptible motions; yet it was
not so inactive as it seemed: it held a regular and monotonous course;
inch by inch it traversed the little orbit of its domain, taking months
to accomplish the whole gyration. It was a restless voyager, that
tortoise!--patiently, and with pain, did it perform its self-appointed
journeys, evincing no interest in the things around it--a philosopher
concentrated in itself. There was something grand in its solitary
selfishness!--the sun in which it basked--the waters poured daily over
it--the air, which it insensibly inhaled, were its sole and unfailing
luxuries. The mild changes of the season, in that lovely clime,
affected it not. It covered itself with its shell--as the saint in his
piety--as the sage in his wisdom--as the lover in his hope.

It was impervious to the shocks and mutations of time--it was an emblem
of time itself: slow, regular, perpetual; unwitting of the passions that
fret themselves around--of the wear and tear of mortality. The poor
tortoise! nothing less than the bursting of volcanoes, the convulsions
of the riven world, could have quenched its sluggish spark! The
inexorable Death, that spared not pomp or beauty, passed unheedingly by
a thing to which death could bring so insignificant a change.

For this animal the mercurial and vivid Greek felt all the wonder and
affection of contrast. He could spend hours in surveying its creeping
progress, in moralizing over its mechanism. He despised it in joy--he
envied it in sorrow.

Regarding it now as he lay along the sward--its dull mass moving while
it seemed motionless, the Athenian murmured to himself:

'The eagle dropped a stone from his talons, thinking to break thy shell:
the stone crushed the head of a poet. This is the allegory of Fate!
Dull thing! Thou hadst a father and a mother; perhaps, ages ago, thou
thyself hadst a mate. Did thy parents love, or didst thou? Did thy
slow blood circulate more gladly when thou didst creep to the side of
thy wedded one? Wert thou capable of affection? Could it distres