THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. 191 
its valleys and hills in dreamy enjoyment. We are 
not, then, surprised that the imaginative Greeks 
should have sung of their Fortunate Islands, the 
habitations of the blessed, placed far away in the 
ocean of the west, and invested with more than 
earthly loveliness; nor that the existence of isles 
of similar character, in the same mysterious, be- 
cause unknown, regions, should have found a place 
in the mythology of even so remote a nation as the 
Hindoos. 
The beauteous scenes before us, however, are as 
transitory as they are lovely: night comes on with 
a rapidity, startling to us accustomed to the long 
twilight of the north; the rich hues with which the 
western sky is suffused, the crimson and ruddy gold, 
speedily change to a warm and swarthy brown, and 
one by one the stars come out, and light up the sky 
with a strange and unwonted effulgence. Humboldt 
describes in the following terms his own emotions 
on first seeing tke brilliant stars of these regions :— 
“From the time we entered the torrid zone, we 
were never wearied with admiring, every night, the 
beauty of the southern sky, which, as we advanced 
towards the south, opened new constellations to our 
view. We feel an indescribable sensation, when, 
on approaching the equator, and particularly on 
passing from one hemisphere to the other, we see 
those stars which we have contemplated from our 
infancy, progressively sink, and finally disappear. 
Nothing awakens in the traveller a livelier remem- 
brance of the immense distance by which he is 
separated from his country, than the aspect of an 
