Night and Morning, Book IV by Edward Bulwer-lytton

"O that sweet gleam of sunshine on the lake! " WILSON'S _City of the Plague_

If, reader, you have ever looked through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, perhaps you have wondered to yourself how things so terrible have been hitherto unknown to you -- you have felt a loathing at the limpid element you hitherto deemed so pure -- you have half fancied that you would cease to be a water-drinker; yet, the next day you have forgotten the grim life that started before you, with its countless shapes, in that teeming globule; and, if so tempted by your thirst, you have not shrunk from the lying crystal, although myriads of the horrible Unseen are mangling, devouring, gorging each other in the liquid you so tranquilly imbibe; so is it with that ancestral and master element called Life.