416 EXCURSIONS BEYOND EGA. Chap. TI. 



The desire, however, of seeing again my parents and 

 enjoying once more the rich pleasures of intellectual 

 society, had succeeded in overcoming the attractions 

 of a region which may be fittingly called a Naturalist's 

 Paradise. During this last night on the Para river, a 

 crowd of unusual thoughts occupied my mind. Recol- 

 lections of English climate, scenery, and modes of life 

 came to me with a vividness I had never before ex- 

 perienced, during the eleven years of my absence. 

 Pictures of startling clearness rose up of the gloomy 

 winters, the long grey twilights, murky atmosj)here, 

 elongated shadows, chilly springs, and sloppy summers ; 

 of factory chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, 

 rung to work in early morning by factory bells ; of 

 union workhouses, confined rooms, artificial cares and 

 slavish conventionalities. To live again amidst these 

 dull scenes I was quitting a country of perpetual summer, 

 where my life had been spent like that of three-fourths 

 of the people in gipsy fashion, on the endless streams 

 or in the boundless forests. I was leaving the equator, 

 where the well-balanced forces of Nature maintained a 

 land-surface and climate that seemed to be typical of 

 mundane order and beauty, to sail towards the North 

 Pole, where lay my home under crepuscular skies some- 

 where about fifty-two degrees of latitude. It was natural 

 to feel a little dismayed at the prospect of so great a 

 change, but now, after three years of renewed experience 

 of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilised 

 life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant 

 nourishment, to the spiritual sterility of half-savage 

 existence, even if it were passed in the garden of Eden. 



