They are the creatures of seclusion, the creatures of shelter; they are exquisite beings, so perfectly and elaborately adapted to their environment that they have taken on something of the roundness and perfection of works of art. Their life, in a sense, is a sea-pool life: unruffled and secret: almost, if we can share the cool illusion of the sea-pool's occupants, inviolable. They hear murmurs of the sea itself, that vast and terrifying force that lies somewhere beyond them, or around them; and if it does, at last, break in upon them with a cataclysmic force, a chaos of disorder and undisciplined violence, they can find no language for the disaster: they are simply bewildered.