MODERN PROSE WRITERS. 7 i 



fortuiiately disfigured by wild theories and erroneoub physical 

 opinions, the aspect of the sea, the grouping of the ckuds, the 

 rustling of the air amid the crowded bamboos, the waving of 

 the leafy crown of the slender palms, are all sketched with 

 inimitable truth. Bernardin ie St. Pierre's master-work, 

 Paid et Virginie, accompanied me to the climes whence it took 

 its origin. For many years it was the constant companion of 

 myself and my valued friend and fellow-traveler Bonpland, 

 and often (the reader must forgive this appeal to personal feel- 

 ings), in the calm brilliancy of a southern sky, or when, in the 

 rainy season, the thunder re-echoed, and the lightning gleamed 

 through the forests that skirt the shores of the Orinoco, we 

 felt ourselves penetrated by the marvelous truth with which 

 tropical nature is described, with all its peculiarity of charac- 

 ter, in this little work. A like power of grasping individuali- 

 ties, without destroying the general impression of the whole, 

 and without depriving the subject of a free innate animation 

 of poetical fancy, characterizes, even in a higher degree, the 

 intellectual and sensitive mind of the author of Atala, Rene, 

 Les Marty res, and Les Voyages a V Orient. In the works of 

 his creative fancy, all contrasts of scenery in the remotest 

 portions of the earth are brought before the reader with the 

 most remarkable distinctness. The earnest grandeur of his- 

 torical associations could alone impart a character of such 

 depth and repose to the impressions produced by a rapid jour- 

 ney. 



In the literature of Germany, as in that of Italy and Spain, 

 the love of nature manifested itself too long under the artifi- 

 cial form of idyl-pastoral romances and didactic poems. Such 

 was the course too frequently pursued by the Persian traveler 

 Paul Flemming, by Brockes, the sensitive Ewald von Kleist, 

 Hagedorn, Salomon Gessner, and by Haller, one of the great- 

 est naturalists of any age, whose local descriptions possess, it 

 must, hov/ever, be owned, a more clearly-defined outline and 

 more objective truth of coloring. The elegiac-idyllic element 

 was conspicuous at that period in the morbid tone pervading 

 landscape poetry, and even in Voss, that noble and profound 

 student of classical antiquity, the poverty of the subject could 

 not be concealed by a higher and more elegant finish of styJe. 

 It vv'as only when the study of the earth's surface acquired pio* 

 foundness and diversity of character, and the natural sciences 

 were no longer limited to a tabular enumeration of marvelous 

 productions, but were elevated to a higher and more corapre* 

 hensive view of comparative geography, that this fi!ii3hccl de> 



