nest timbers in the
world. And what are those at the top of the brow, rising out of the
rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are
palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a
young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old
ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened
in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering
round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of
a coconut. But these are not cocos. The last year's leaves of the
coco are rich yellow, and its stem is curved. These are groo-groos;
{79c} they stand as fresh proofs that we are indeed in the Tropics,
and as 'a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.'

For it is a joy for ever, a sight never to be forgotten, to have
once seen palms, breaking through and, as it were, defying the soft
rounded forms of the broad-leaved vegetation by the stern grace of
their simple lines; the immovable pillar-stem looking the more
immovable beneath the toss and lash and flicker of the long leaves,
as they awake out of their sunlit sleep, and rage impatiently for a
while before the mountain gusts, and fall asleep again. Like a
Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room, sharp cut, cold, virginal;
shaming, by the grandeur of mere form, the voluptuousness of mere
colour, however rich and harmonious; so stands the palm in the
forest; to be worshipped rather than to be loved. Look at the
drawings of the Oreodoxa-avenue at Rio, in M. Agassiz's charming
book. Would that you could see actually such avenues, even from the
sea, as we have seen them in St. Vincent and Guadaloupe: but look
at the mere pictures of them in that book, and you will sympathise,
surely, with our new palm-worship.

And lastly, what is that giant tree which almost fills the centre of
the glen, towering with upright but branching limbs, and huge crown,
thinly leaved, double the height of all the trees around? An ash?
Something like an ash in growth; but when you look at it through the
glasses (indispensable in the tropic forest), you see that the
foliage is more like that of the yellow horse-chestnut. And no
British ash, not even the Altyre giants, ever reached to half that
bulk. It is a Silk-cotton tree; a Ceiba {79d}--say, rather, the
Ceiba of the glen; for these glens have a habit of holding each one
great Ceiba, which has taken its stand at the u