68 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY. 



human form, and next those which- are most wild and most 

 formidable to man. The cotemporaries of these travellers 

 gave the fullest credence to dangers which few among them 

 had shared ; the slowness of navigation, and the absence 

 of means of communication, caused the Indies, as all tropical 

 countries were then called, to appear at an immeasurable 

 distance. Columbus was as yet scarcely justified in saying, 

 as he did in his letter to Queen Isabella, "the earth is not 

 very large : it is much less than people imagine" ( l02 ). 



In respect to composition, these almost-forgotten books 

 of travels of the middle ages had, notwithstanding the poverty 

 of their materials, great advantages over most of our modern 

 voyages. Tney nad the unity which every work of art re- 

 quires: everything was connected with an action, t. e. 

 subordinated to the journey itself. The interest arose from 

 the simple, animated, and usually implicitly believed narrative 

 of difficulties overcome. Christian travellers, unacquainted 

 with the previous travels of Arabs, Spanish Jews, and 

 proselytizing Buddhists, always supposed themselves to be 

 the first to see and describe everything. The remoteness 

 and even the dimensions of objects were magnified by the 

 obscurity which seemed to veil the East and the interior of 

 Asia. This attractive unity of composition is necessarily 

 wanting in the greater part of modern travels, and especially 

 in those undertaken for scientific purposes ; in these, what 

 is done yields precedence to what is observed ; the action 

 almost disappears under the multitude of observations. A 

 true dramatic interest can now only be looked for, in 

 arduous, though perhaps little instructive ascents of moun- 

 tains, and above all adventurous navigations of untraversed 

 in voyages of discovery properly so called, and in the 



