154 VIEWS OF NATURE. 



which we view, or mountain or plain, sometimes beaming 

 beneath an azure sky, sometimes enveloped in the gloom of 

 lowering clouds. Thus, too, descriptions of nature affect 

 us more or less powerfully, in proportion as they harmonize 

 with the condition of our own feelings. For the physical 

 world is reflected with truth and animation on the inner 

 susceptible world of the mind. Whatever marks the cha- 

 racter of a landscape: the profile of mountains, which in 

 the far and hazy distance bound the horizon; the deep 

 gloom of pine forests; the mountain torrent, which rushes 

 ' headlong to its fall through overhanging cliffs : all stand alike 

 Win an ancient and mysterious communion with the spiritual 

 * life of man. 



From this communion arises the nobler portion of the 

 enjoyment which nature affords. Nowhere does she more 

 deeply impress us with a sense of her greatness, nowhere does 

 'she speak to us more forcibly than in the tropical world, 

 beneath the " Indian sky," as the climate of the torrid zone 

 was called in the early period of the Middle Ages. While I 

 now, therefore, venture to give a delineation of these regions, 

 I am encouraged to hope that the peculiar charm which 

 belongs to them will not be unfelt. The remembrance of a 

 distant and richly endowed land, the aspect of a free and 

 powerful vegetation, refreshes and strengthens the mind; 

 even as our soaring spirit, oppressed with the cares of the 

 present, turns with delight to contemplate the early dawn of 

 mankind and its simple grandeur.* 



Western currents and tropical winds favour the passage 

 over that pacific arm of the sea (1) which occupies the 

 vast valley stretching between the New Continent and Western 

 Africa. Before the shore is seen to emerge from the highly 

 curved expanse of waters, a foaming rush of conflicting and 



* Humboldt, in this and other pages of his lecture, addressed, it 

 ghould be remembered, to the citizens of Berlin, in 1806, evidently 

 alludes to the troubles of the times. Ed. 



