long processions
of monkeys, who kept pace with them along the tree-tops, and proclaimed
their wonder in every imaginable whistle, and grunt, and howl, had
ceased to move their laughter, as much as the roar of the jaguar and the
rustle of the boa had ceased to move their fear; and when a brilliant
green and rose-colored fish, flat-bodied like a bream, flab-finned like
a salmon, and saw-toothed like a shark, leapt clean on board of the
canoe to escape the rush of the huge alligator (whose loathsome snout,
ere he could stop, actually rattled against the canoe within a foot of
Jack Brimblecombe's hand), Jack, instead of turning pale, as he had done
at the sharks upon a certain memorable occasion, coolly picked up the
fish, and said, "He's four pound weight! If you can catch 'pirai' for
us like that, old fellow, just keep in our wake, and we'll give you the
cleanings for wages."

Yes. The mind of man is not so "infinite," in the vulgar sense of that
word, as people fancy; and however greedy the appetite for wonder may
be, while it remains unsatisfied in everyday European life, it is as
easily satiated as any other appetite, and then leaves the senses of
its possessor as dull as those of a city gourmand after a lord mayor's
feast. Only the highest minds--our Humboldts, and Bonplands, and
Schomburgks (and they only when quickened to an almost unhealthy
activity by civilization)--can go on long appreciating where Nature is
insatiable, imperious, maddening, in her demands on our admiration. The
very power of observing wears out under the rush of ever new objects;
and the dizzy spectator is fain at last to shut the eyes of his soul,
and take refuge (as West Indian Spaniards do) in tobacco and stupidity.
The man, too, who has not only eyes but utterance,--what shall he do
where all words fail him? Superlatives are but inarticulate, after all,
and give no pictures even of size any more than do numbers of feet and
yards: and yet what else can we do, but heap superlative on superlative,
and cry, "Wonderful, wonderful!" and after that, "wonderful, past all
whooping"? What Humboldt's self cannot paint, we will not try to daub.
The voyagers were in a South American forest, readers. Fill up the
meaning of those words, each as your knowledge enables you, for I cannot
do it for you.

Certainly those adventurers could not. The absence of any attempt at
word-painting, even of admiration at the glorious things which they saw,
is most rema