rkable in all early voyagers, both Spanish and English. The
only two exceptions which I recollect are Columbus--(but then all was
new, and he was bound to tell what he had seen)--and Raleigh; the two
most gifted men, perhaps, with the exception of Humboldt, who ever set
foot in tropical America; but even they dare nothing but a few feeble
hints in passing. Their souls had been dazzled and stunned by a great
glory. Coming out of our European Nature into that tropic one, they had
felt like Plato's men, bred in the twilight cavern, and then suddenly
turned round to the broad blaze of day; they had seen things awful and
unspeakable: why talk of them, except to say with the Turks, "God is
great!"

So it was with these men. Among the higher-hearted of them, the grandeur
and the glory around had attuned their spirits to itself, and kept up in
them a lofty, heroical, reverent frame of mind; but they knew as little
about the trees and animals in an "artistic" or "critical" point
of view, as in a scientific one. This tree the Indians called one
unpronounceable name, and it made good bows; that, some other name, and
it made good canoes; of that, you could eat the fruit; that produced the
caoutchouc gum, useful for a hundred matters; that was what the Indians
(and they likewise) used to poison their arrows with; from the ashes of
those palm-nuts you could make good salt; that tree, again, was full of
good milk if you bored the stem: they drank it, and gave God thanks, and
were not astonished. God was great: but that they had discovered long
before they came into the tropics. Noble old child-hearted heroes, with
just romance and superstition enough about them to keep them from that
prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm, which is simply, one often
fears, a product of our scepticism! We do not trust enough in God, we do
not really believe His power enough, to be ready, as they were, as every
one ought to be on a God-made earth, for anything and everything being
possible; and then, when a wonder is discovered, we go into ecstasies
and shrieks over it, and take to ourselves credit for being susceptible
of so lofty a feeling, true index, forsooth, of a refined and cultivated
mind.

They paddled onward hour after hour, sheltering themselves as best they
could under the shadow of the southern bank, while on their right hand
the full sun-glare lay upon the enormous wall of mimosas, figs, and
laurels, which formed the northern forest, b