Coiled in spires, folded in layers, knotted on themselves, or "extended long and large," they weltered in motionless heaps--shapes more fantastic in ghoulish, blasting dismay, than ever wine-sodden brain of exhausted poet fevered into misbeing.

He who dived in the swirling Maelstrom saw none to compare with them in horror: tentacular convolutions, tumid bulges, glaring orbs of sepian deformity, would have looked to him innocence beside such incarnations of hatefulness--every head the wicked flower that, bursting from an abominable stalk, perfected its evil significance.
Not one of them moved as we passed.

But they were not dead.

So long as exist men and women of unwholesome mind, that lake will still be peopled with loathsomenesses.
But hark the herald of the sun, the auroral wind, softly trumpeting his approach! The master-minister of the human tabernacle is at hand! Heaping before his prow a huge ripple-fretted wave of crimson and gold, he rushes aloft, as if new launched from the urging hand of his maker into the upper sea--pauses, and looks down on the world.

White-raving storm of molten metals, he is but a coal from the altar of the Father's never-ending sacrifice to his children.