26 THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE CHAP. 
combines splendour and purity so perfectly as 
a great mountain entirely covered with frozen 
snow and reflected in the vast mirror of a 
lake. As the sun declines, its thousand 
shadows lengthen, pure as the cold green 
azure in the depth of a glacier’s crevasse, and 
the illuminated snow takes first the tender 
colour of a white rose, and then the flush of a 
red one, and the sky turns to a pale malachite 
green, till the rare strange vision fades into 
ghastly gray, but leaves with you a permanent 
recollection of its too transient beauty.” ? 
Wallace especially, and very justly, praises 
the description of tropical forest scenery given 
by Belt in his charming JVaturalist in Nica- 
ragua :— 
“On each side of the road great trees 
towered up, carrying their crowns out of sight 
amongst a canopy of foliage, and with lianas 
hanging from nearly every bough, and passing 
from tree to tree, entangling the giants in a 
great network of coiling cables. Sometimes 
a tree appears covered with beautiful flowers 
which do not belong to it, but to one of the 
1 Hamerton’s Landscape. 
