40 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



rainy season ( 61 ) traced by myself, in South America, at a 

 time when I was wholly unacquainted with Kalidasa's 

 Meghaduta, even in Chez/s translation. The obscure 

 meteorological processes which take place in the atmosphere, 

 in the formation of vapour, in the shape of the clouds, and 

 in the luminous electric phsenoinena, are the same in the 

 tropical regions of both continents; and idealising art, 

 whose province it is to form the actual into the ideal image, 

 will surely lose none of its magic power by the discovery 

 that the analysing spirit of observation of a later age con- 

 firms the truth to nature of the older, purely graphical and 

 poetical representation. 



We pass from the East Arians, or the Brahminic Indians, 

 and their strongly marked sense of picturesque beauty in 

 nature ( 62 ), to the West Arians, or Persians, who had 

 migrated into the northern country of the Zend, and were 

 originally disposed to combine with the dualistic belief in 

 Ormuzd and Ahrimanes a spiritualised veneration of nature. 

 What we term Persian literature does not reach farther back 

 than the period of the Sassanides ; the older poetic memorials 

 have perished ; and it was not until the country had been sub- 

 jugated by the Arabs, and the characteristics of its earlier inha- 

 bitants in great measure obliterated, that it regained a national 

 literature, under the Samanides, Gaznevides, and Seldschuki. 

 The flourishing period of its poetry, from lirdusi to Hafiz and 

 Dschami, can hardly be said to have lasted four or five cen- 

 turies, and extends but little beyond the epoch of Vasco de 

 Gama. The literatures of Persia and of India are separated 

 by time as well as by space ; the Persian belonging to the 

 middle ages, while the great literature of India belongs 

 strictly to antiquity. lu the Iraunian highlands, nature 



