The Water-Babies

Chapter VII. The epigraph is from the American poet H. W. Longfellow’s birthday poem for the naturalist Louis Agassiz, in which Nature the old Nurse shows a child the Manuscripts of God. Tom learns that Grimes is at the Other-end-of-Nowhere and sets out north, meeting a widow and her baby, the last Gairfowl, the petrels and a parliament of hooded crows, and after a gale gaining a terrier as his guide. Fulmars carry him to Shiny Wall. He dives under it and finds Mother Carey making creatures make themselves. The chapter ends with Tom walking backward all the way, deaf to the prophets who bawl at him to look ahead, and it adds the book’s picture of creation and its praise of patient induction.

Chapter VIII and Last. The epigraph is Longfellow’s poem to children, who are better than all the ballads ever sung. Tom crosses the ocean floor, passes the satirical lands of the Other-end-of-Nowhere and the Isle of Tomtoddies, and finds Grimes in a prison chimney, beaten by the hail of his mother’s frozen tears. Grimes repents, and his tears free him. The fairy sends him to sweep Etna, and up the backstairs Tom finds Ellie grown and sees the fairy reveal herself as all her forms at once, though her name cannot be read. The chapter ends with Tom a man of science and his dog in the sky as the dog-star, and it completes the book’s judgement, release and unveiling.

Moral. The narrator asks what the parable teaches, and answers that efts are water-babies who would not learn or keep clean, and who may slowly work their way back, and he hopes, with Bishop Butler, for another chance for them. He tells the child to learn his lessons and wash in cold water, and ends by warning him not to believe a word of it.