434 COSMOS, 



ind 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 historical associations 

 could alone impart a character of such depth and repose to 

 the impressions produced by a rapid journey. 



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

 the love of nature manifested itself too long under the artificial 

 form of idyl-pastoral romances, and didactic poems. Such was 

 the course too frequently pursued by the Persian traveller, 

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

 Hagedorn, Salomon Gessner. and by Haller, one of the greatest 

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

 however be owned, a more clearly defined outline, and more 

 objective truth of colouring. The elegiac-idyllic element was 

 conspicuous at that period in the morbid tone pervading land- 

 scape 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 style. It 

 was only when the study of the earth's surface acquired pro- 

 foundness and diversity of character, and the natural sciences 

 were no longer limited to a tabular enumeration of marvellous 

 productions, but were elevated to a higher and more com- 

 prehensive view of comparative geography, that this finished 

 development of language could be employed for the purpose 

 of giving animated pictures of distant regions. 



The earlier travellers of the middle ages, as for instance, 

 John Mandeville (1353), Hans Schiltberger of Munich 

 (1425), and Bernhard von Breytenbach (1486), delight us even 

 in the present day by their charming simplicity, their free- 

 dom of style, and the self-confidence with which they step 

 before a public, who, from their utter ignorance, listen with 

 the greater curiosity and readiness of belief, because they 

 have not as yet learnt to feel ashamed of appearing ignorant, 

 amused, or astonished. The interest attached to the narra- 

 tives of travels was then almost wholly dramatic, and the 

 necessary and easily introduced admixture of the marvellous, 

 gave them almost an epic colouring. The manners of foreign 

 nations are not so much described, as they are rendered inci- 

 dentally discernible by the contact of the travellers with the 

 natives. The vegetation is unnamed and unheeded, with the 



