26 THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE chap. 



combines splendour and purity so perfectly as 

 a great mountain entirely covered with frozen 

 snow and reflected in the vast mirror of a 

 lake. As the sun declines, its thousand 

 shadows lengthen, pure as the cold green 

 azure in the depth of a glacier's crevasse, and 

 the illuminated snow takes first the tender 

 colour of a white rose, and then the flush of a 

 red one, and the sky turns to a pale malachite 

 green, till the rare strange vision fades into 

 ghastly gray, but leaves with you a permanent 

 recollection of its too transient beauty." ^ 



Wallace especially, and very justly, praises 

 the description of tropical forest scenery given 

 by Belt in his charming Naturalist in Nica- 

 ragua : — 



" On each side of the road great trees 

 towered up, carrying their crowns out of sight 

 amongst a canopy of foliage, and with lianas 

 hanging from nearly every bough, and passing 

 from tree to tree, entangling the giants in a 

 great network of coiling cables. Sometimes 

 a tree appears covered with beautiful flowers 

 which do not belong to it, but to one of the 



' Hamerton's Landscape. 



