earth with the splendour of Aurora. The effect is beautifully alluded to by Mallet. The sun— glorious from amidst A pomp of golden clouds, th' Atlantic flood These alternations cause a perpetual variety in the same objects. Hence the frequent interchanges, which exhibit themselves in a mountainous country, give it a decided advantage over open and campaign regions; since the degrees of light and shade, as the hills and valleys incline towards each other, are blended, reflected, and contrasted, in a thousand different ways. These contrasted scenes are perpetually exhibited in Italy, in Sicily, among the Carpathian mountains, and, more particularly, among the vales and lakes of Switzerland. At Spitzbergen the scenery is composed of bleak rocks and mountains: icebergs fill the valleys; and the whole is most romantically contrasted with the whiteness of the snow and the green colour of the ice a. The voyager is never weary of gazing. The total want of contrast, on the other hand, fatigues a traveller over the Steppes of Asia, the Pampas of Buenos Ayres and Chaco, the Savannahs of North America, the Llanos of Varinas and Caraccas, and the deserts of Africa, almost as much as the actual distances themselves. : The ancients, ignorant of the magnetic powers of the needle, were able to travel over deserts only by night when the sun appeared, therefore, they were obliged to halt. Quintius Curtius, in describing the deserts of Bactria, says, A similar scene is described, as having been exhibited in one of the icebergs, in Amsterdam Island, by D'Auvergne. b The only desert in America is that in the low part of Peru, stretching to the Pacific. It is not very broad, but in length it is 440 leagues. e Lib. iv. c. 7. that a great part of them were covered with barren sands, parched by heat; affording nourishment for neither men, beasts, nor vegetables. When the wind blew from the Pontic Sea, they swept before them immense quantities of sand, which, when heaped together, appeared like mountains. All tracks of former travellers were thus totally obliterated. The only resource left, therefore, was to travel by night, guiding their course by the direction of the stars. Silius Italicus thus describes the journey of Hannibal's ambassadors to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, situated in the deserts of Lybia. Ad finem coeli medio tenduntur ab ore Squalentes campi. Tumulum natura negavit Lucan, whose description of the march of Cato, over the deserts, is, unquestionably, the finest portion of the Pharsalia, adds a circumstance, that must have considerably augmented the difficulties of the march. Qui nullas vidêre domos, vidêre ruinas ; Jamque iter omne latet; nec sunt discrimina terræ Sideribus novêre vias: nec Sidera tota Ostendit Lybica finitor circulus oræ Multaque devexo terrarum margine celat a. At the North Cape, Acerbi felt as if all the cares of life had vanished; worldly pursuits assumed the character of a Pharsal. ix. v. 404. dreams; the forms and energies of animated Nature seemed to fade; and the earth appeared as if it were susceptible of being analysed into its original elements. Naturalists behold with delight, bees entering the cups of flowers, and robbing them of their nectar; the anxious solicitude with which ewes permit lambs to draw milk from their udders; and the affection of turtles, sitting under a leafy canopy with their mates. In the northern regions no objects like these present themselves. There is nothing which can remind the traveller of Cashmere, of Circassia, the valleys of Madagascar, or the perfumed shores of Arabia Felix. A solemn magnificence, an interminable space, wearing the aspect of infinity, characterise the scene. The billows dash in awful grandeur against rocks, coeval with the globe; marine birds, wild in character, and dissonant in language, skim along their girdles; the moon sheds her solemn lustre on their dark and frowning pyramids; the stars glow with burnished brilliancy; and the Aurora Borealis adds terrific interest to the melancholy majesty of the scene. And yet, magnificent as these scenes assuredly are, the nerves chill in their contemplation; the heart sinks with sullen melancholy; and the soul deepens into an awful sadness: for man stands in the midst an alien and alone. What contrasted pictures to these are presented from the Monthenon, near the city of Lausanne! To the north stands the chateau de Beaulieu, immortalised by the residence of Neckar and his celebrated daughter, when escaped from the intrigues and tumults of Paris. There, too, is seen a weeping willow, standing in a garden, planted by the taste of the illustrious Gibbon. To the east rise three mountains covered with snow, and towering to a height of more than 10,000 feet Clarens, the beautiful Clarens, lying below, with the chateau de Chillon on one side, and the small town of Villeneuve on the other. Pursuing the curve of the lake, the Rhone is beheld issuing, as it were, from the womb of a : long range of rocks, harmonized with aerial tints; and seeming to flow out of a secret valley, for the purpose of mingling its waters with the deep azure of one of the loveliest lakes beneath the canopy of heaven. To the south, over the mountains of Savoy, Mont Blanc is seen lifting its white head like a speck amid the clouds: below, are the towns of St. Gingoulph, and the rocks and buildings of Meillerie. The lake then stretches towards the neighbourhood of Geneva; and a distant glimmering of the water denotes the spot where the Rhone, through an opening of the Jura range, flows into France. If at the North Cape we behold, as it were, the birth-place of Scandinavian genius, the neighbourhood of Lausanne may be recognised as the residence of true poetical enthusiasm. Hark! with what ecstatic fire She strikes the deep-resounding lyre. On every rock the echo rung, On scenes so fair, on notes so wild. Hung o'er the soft seraphic lay; While Rapture rais'd her hands on high, Deserts, from their expansion, sterility, privations, and unbroken silence, are terrific and sublime to the last degree. The deserts of America are said to have a character, producing a melancholy, which no language can adequately express. Those of Asia and Africa afflict the mind with still more powerful emotions. A stillness, like that of the grave, pervades the whole scene, from the northern horizon to the southern. A sea of sand stretches from the east to the west: not a tree, nor a blade of grass, relieves the eye: amplitude of space gives an amplitude to the mind; and a sublimity is imparted to the imagination, which promises a surety of immortality to the soul. With deserts we associate the camel and the ostrich: The former exhibiting a curious instance of the use of animals to the human race; the latter, leading with its mate a secure, innocent, and social life : and so far from leaving her eggs or her young, as many have supposed, to the mercy of the elements, she pays them an earnest and a strict, but, from the nature of the climate in which she lives, a divided attention. Her mate and herself watch them alternately. b With deserts are also associated serpents; and as the traveller wanders over the wastes, he may amuse his imagination with recalling the powerful scene in the tragedy of Æschylus, where Orestes is described as being stained with blood and supplicating protection; while women, whose hair consists of serpents, lie sleeping around him. Then he may rest on the Laocoon of the Vatican; Virgil's simile of a combat between a serpent and an eagle; Satan's return to the infernal regions © ; or the illustration of a converted African. "The serpent, by pressing against two bushes, shifts himself every year of his skin. When we see this skin, we do not say, the serpent is dead;-no! the serpent lives; and has only cast his skin. This skin we may compare to our body; the serpent itself to the soul." Many of these deserts, like the vale in Persia, called the Valley of the Angel of Death, are lands that "no man passes through, and where no man dwells d." Wastes of glowing sand,—they bear for their character the deep and majestic stillness of the wilderness; with no habitation; no motion; not a trace of animal or vegetable existence; and where a Parsons' Trav. in Asia and Africa, 146, 4to. d Jerem. xi. v. 6. |