438 COSMOS. 



left unemployed, by which an animated picture of a distant 

 zone, untraversed by ourselves, may be presented to the mind 

 with all the vividness of truth, enabling us even to enjoy some 

 portion of the pleasure derived from the immediate contact 

 with nature? The Arabs express themselves no less truly 

 than metaphorically, when they say that the best description 

 is that by which the ear is converted into an eye.* It is one 

 of the evils of the present day, that an unhappy tendency to 

 vapid poetic prose, and to sentimental effusions, has infected 

 simultaneously in different countries even the style of many 

 justly celebrated travellers and writers on natural history. 

 Extravagancies of this nature are so much the more to be 

 regretted, where the style degenerates into rhetorical bombast 

 or morbid sentimentality, either from want of literary cultiva- 

 tion, or more particularly from the absence of all genuine 

 emotion. 



Descriptions of nature, I would again observe, may be 

 defined with sufficient sharpness and scientific accuracy, with- 

 out on that account being deprived of the vivifying breath of 

 imagination. The poetic element must emanate from the 

 intuitive perception of the connection between the sensuous 

 and the intellectual, and of the universality and reciprocal 

 limitation and unity of all the vital forces of nature. The 

 more elevated the subject, the more carefully should all ex- 

 ternal adornments of diction be avoided. The true effect of 

 a picture of nature depends on its composition ; every attempt 

 at an artificial appeal from the author must therefore necessarily 

 exert a disturbing influence. He who, familiar with the great 

 works of antiquity, and secure in the possession of the riches 

 of his native language, knows how to represent with the sim- 

 plicity of individualising truth that which he has received 

 from his own contemplation, will not fail in producing the 

 impression he seeks to convey ; for, in describing the bound- 

 lessness of nature, and not the limited circuit of his own 

 mind, he is enabled to leave to others unfettered freedom of 

 feeling. 



It is not, however, the vivid description of the richly 

 adorned lands of the equinoctial zone in which intensity of 

 light and of humid heat accelerates and heightens the de- 

 velopment of all organic germs, that has alone imparted the 



* Freytag's Darstellung cler arabischen VersTcunst, 1830, s. 402. 



