probably depend on our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable ones.  The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that; the living hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, it is just as much a hieroglyph as the other; nay, more,—­a “sacred or reserved sculpture,” a thing with an inner language.  The serpent crest of the king’s crown, or of the god’s, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery, but the serpent itself, gliding past the pillar’s foot, is it less a mystery?  Is there, indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that running brook of horror on the ground?

68.  Why that horror?  We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how disproportioned to the real strength of the creature!  There is more poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door, than in the deadliest asp of Nile.  Every back yard which you look down into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford, holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and lifted head.  There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word, sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever “vanti Libia con sua rena.”  But that horror is of the myth, not of the creature.  There are myriads lower than this, and more loathsome, in the scale of being; the links between dead matter and animation drift everywhere unseen.  But it is the strength of the base element that is so dreadful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the earth.  That rivulet of smooth silver, how does it flow, think you?  It literally rows on the earth, with every scale for an oar; it bites the dust with the ridges of its body.  Watch it, when it moves slowly.  A wave, but without wind! a current, but with no fall! all the body moving at the same instant, yet some of it to one side, some to another, or some forward, and the rest of the coil backwards, but all with the same calm will and equal way, no contraction, no extension; one soundless, causeless, march of sequent rings, and spectral processions of spotted dust, with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils.  Startle it, the winding stream will become a twisted arrow; the wave of poisoned life will lash through the grass like a cast lance.* It scarcely breathes with its one lung (the other shriveled and abortive); it is passive to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone; yet “it can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger."** It is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth, of the entire earthly nature.  As the bird is the clothed power of the air, so this is the clothed power of the dust; as the bird is the symbol of the spirit of life, so this is the grasp and sting of death.