432 COSMOS. 



versed in physical investigations than his cotemporaries 

 supposed, shows more artificial elaboration of style and more 

 rhetorical pomp than individualising truthfulness, when he 

 passes from the description of the habits of animals to the 

 delineation of natural scenery, inclining the mind to the re- 

 ception of exalted impressions, rather than seizing upon the 

 imagination by presenting a visible picture of actual nature, jor 

 conveying to the senses the echo as it were of reality. Even 

 throughout the most justly celebrated of his works in this 

 department of literature, we instinctively feel that he could 

 never have left Central Europe, and that he is deficient in 

 personal observation of the tropical world, which he believes 

 he is correctly describing. But that which we most espe- 

 cially miss in the writings of the great naturalist, is a har- 

 monious mode of connecting the representation of nature 

 with the expression of awakened feelings; he is in fact defi- 

 cient in almost all that flows from the mysterious analogy 

 existing between the mental emotions of the mind and the 

 phenomena of the perceptive world. 



A greater depth of feeling, and a fresher spirit of anima- 

 tion pervade the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Bernardin 

 de St. Pierre, and Chateaubriand. If I here allude to the per- 

 suasive eloquence of the first of those writers, as manifested 

 in the picturesque scenes of Clarens and La Meillerie on 

 Lake Leman, it is because in the principal works of this 

 zealous but ill-instructed plant- collector which were written 

 twenty years before Buffon's fanciful Epoques de la Nature* 



* The succession in which the works referred to were published is as 

 follows: Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1759, Nouvelle Heloise; Buffon, 

 Epoques de la Nature, 1778, but his Histoire Naturdle, 1749--1767; 

 Bernardin de St. Pierre, Etudes de la Nature, 1784, Paid et Vitginie, 

 1788, Chaumiere Indienne, 1791; George Forster, Reise nach der 

 Sudsee, 1777, Kleine Scliriften, 1794. More than half a century before 

 the publication of the Nouvelle Heloise, Madame de Sevigne, in her 

 charming letters, had already shown a vivid sense of the beauty of 

 nature, such as was rarely expressed in the age of Louis XIV. See 

 the fine natural descriptions in the letters of April 20, May 31, Au- 

 gust 15, September 16, and November 6, 1671, and October 23 and 

 December 28, 1689 (Aubenas, Hist, de Madame de Sevigne, 1842, 

 pp. 201 and 427.) My reason for referring in the text to the old 

 German poet, Paul* Flemming, who, from 1633 to 1639, accompanied 

 AdamOlearius on his journey to Muscovy and to Persia, is that, accord- 

 ing to the convincing authority of my friend, Yarnhagen von Ensc 

 (BioyraphiscJie Denkw. bd. iv. g. 4, 75, and 129), "the character of 



