FIKST VIEW OF THE PACIFIC. 299 



to disperse, but at such moments our field of view was 

 again restricted by intervening heights. 



The desire which we feel to behold certain objects does 

 not depend solely on their grandeur, their beauty, or their 

 importance ; it is interwoven in each individual with many 

 accidental impressions of his youth, with early predilection 

 for particular occupations, with an attachment to the remote 

 and distant, and with the love of an active and varied life. 

 The previous improbability of the fulfilment of a wish 

 gives besides to its realisation a peculiar kind of charm. 

 The traveller enjoys by anticipation the first sight of the 

 constellation of the cross, and of the Magellanic clouds 

 circling round the Southern Pole, of the snow of the 

 Chimborazo, and the column of smoke ascending from the 

 volcano of Quito, of the first grove of tree-ferns, and of 

 the Pacific Ocean. The days on which such wishes are 

 realised form epochs in life, and produce ineffaceable im- 

 pressions; exciting feelings of which the vividness seeks 

 not justification by processes of reasoning. With the long- 

 ing which I felt for the first view of the Pacific from the 

 crests of the Andes, there mingled the interest with which 

 I had listened as a boy to the narrative of the adventurous 

 expedition of Yasco Nunez de Balboa, ( 18 ) the fortunate 

 man who (followed by Francisco Pizarro) first among Euro- 

 peans beheld from the heights of Quarequa, on the Isthmus 

 of Panama, the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean, the 

 "South Sea." The reedy shores of the Caspian, at the 

 place where I first saw them, i. e. from the Delta formed by 

 the mouths of the Volga, cannot certainly be called pictu- 



