The aspect and the physiognomy of the vegetation, the impenetrable thickets of the forest, "in which one can hardly distinguish which are the flowers and leaves belonging to each stem;" the wild luxuriance which clothed the humid shores; the rose-coloured flamingoes fishing at the mouth of the rivers in the early morning, and giving animation to the landscape, attract the attention of the old navigator while sailing along the coast of Cuba, between the small Lucayan islands and the Jardinillos. Each newly-discovered land appears to him still more beautiful than those he had before described; he complains that he cannot find words in which to record the sweet impressions which he has received.
"The loveliness of this new land," says the discoverer, "far surpasses that of the Campina de Cordoba. The trees are all bright with ever-verdant foliage, and perpetually laden with fruits. The plants on the ground are tall and full of blossoms. The breezes are mild like those in April in Castille; the nightingales sing more sweetly than I can describe. At night, other small birds sing sweetly, and I also hear our grasshoppers and frogs. Once I came into a deeply-enclosed harbour, and saw high mountains which no human eye had seen before, from which lovely waters streamed down. The mountain was covered with firs, pines, and other trees of very various form, and adorned with beautiful flowers. Ascending the river, which poured itself into the bay, I was astonished at the cool shade, the crystal clear water, and the number of singing birds. It seemed as if I could never quit a spot so delightful—as if a thousand tongues would fail to describe it, as if the spell-bound hand would refuse to write."
We have here, from the journal of an unlettered seaman, the power which the beauty of nature, manifested in her individual forms, may exert on a susceptible mind. Feelings ennoble language; for the prose of the admiral, especially when, on his fourth voyage, at the age of 67, he relates his wonderful dream on the coast of Veragua, is, if not more eloquent, yet far more moving, than the allegorical pastoral romance of Boccacio and the two Arcadias of Sannazaro and Sydney; than Garcilasso's Salicio y Nemoroso; or than the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.
EARLY INCITEMENTS TO A SCIENTIFIC STUDY
OF NATURE.
Baron Humboldt, in the opening of his Cosmos, vol. ii., recalls the lessons of experience, which tell us how often impressions received by the senses from circumstances, seemingly accidental, have so acted on the youthful mind as to determine the whole direction of the man's course through life. Childish pleasure, in the form of countries and of seas, as delineated in maps; the desire to behold those southern constellations which have never risen in our horizon; the sight of palms and of the cedars of Lebanon, figured in a pictorial Bible, may have implanted in the spirit the first impulse to travel in distant lands.
"If I might (says Humboldt) have recourse to my own experience, and say what awakened in me the first beginnings of an inextinguishable longing to visit the tropics, I should name George Forster's descriptions of the islands of the Pacific—paintings, by Hodge, in the house of Warren Hastings, in London, representing the banks of the Ganges—and a colossal dragon-tree in an old tower of the Botanic Gardens at Berlin."