its
circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light,
Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement
into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten
work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and
flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and
orange and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the
burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under
lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see
the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green,
where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and
dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of
the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of
rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low
along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth
heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with
a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and
splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas,
beaten by storm and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious
pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from
among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their
peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron,
sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight.
And, having once traversed in thought its gradation of the zoned iris of
the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and
watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the multitudes of
swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread
the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards,
glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us
contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of color, and swiftness of
motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky
plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the
Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope
with the elk, the bird of paradise with the osprey: and then,
submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all
that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, but
rejoice at