DEPARTURE FOR ENGLAND 513 



portions and sent by three separate ships, to lessen the 

 risk of loss of the whole. On the evening of the third 

 of June, I took a last view of the glorious forest for which 

 I had so much love, and to explore which I had devoted 

 so many years. The saddest hours I ever recollect to 

 have spent were those of the succeeding night when, the 

 mameluco pilot having left us free of the shoals and out 

 of sight of land though within the mouth of the river at 

 anchor waiting for the wind, I felt that the last link 

 which connected me with the land of so many pleasing 

 recollections was broken. The Paracuses, who are fully 

 aware of the attractiveness of their country, have an 

 alliterative proverb, ' Quem vai para (o) Para para ' (' He 

 who goes to Para stops there '), and I had often thought I 

 should myself have been added to the list of examples. 

 The desire, however, of seeing again my parents and 

 enjoying once more the rich pleasures of intellectual 

 society, had succeeded in overcoming the attractions of 

 a region which may be fittingly called a Naturalist's 

 Paradise. During this last night on the Para river, a 

 crowd of unusual thoughts occupied my mind. Recol- 

 lections of English climate, scenery, and modes of life 

 came to me with a vividness I had never before ex- 

 perienced, during the eleven years of my absence. Pic- 

 tures of startling clearness rose up of the gloomy winters, 

 the long gray twilights, murky atmosphere, elongated 

 shadows, chilly springs, and sloppy summers ; of factory 

 chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, rung to work 

 in early morning by factory bells ; of union workhouses, 

 confined rooms, artificial cares and slavish conventiona- 

 lities. To live again amidst these dull scenes I was 

 quitting a country of perpetual summer, where my life 

 had been spent like that of three- fourths of the people 

 in gipsy fashion, on the endless streams or in the bound- 

 less forests. I was leaving the equator, where the well- 

 balanced forces of Nature maintained a land surface and 

 climate that seemed to be typical of mundane order and 

 beauty, to sail towards the North Pole, where lay my 

 home under crepuscular skies somewhere about fifty-two 

 degrees of latitude. It was natural to feel a little dis- 

 mayed at the prospect of so great a change, but now, 

 after three years of renewed experience of England, I 

 find how incomparably superior is civilized life, where 

 feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, 



2 K 



