78 
TTS SILENCE AND SOLITUDE. 
And eternal spring may almost be said to prevail in the Amazonian 
forest. Winter there is none ; and, consequently, no interruption to 
Nature's process of growth. Trees ripen and decay, it is true ; but 
each falls singly when its life is done. There is no uniform bareness, 
and nakedness, and desolation, as in the European woods. If Death be 
always busy, so is Life; fresh forms come and go in never-ending 
sequence. A tree that in the evening was one uniform mass of foliage, 
is seen by the morning to have developed into a great dome of flowers; 
and often, so pregnant is its vitality, and to such an extent is it stimu- 
lated by the tropical heat, fruit and blossom will hang from the same 
bough. 
What is most impressive about the virgin forest is its silence and 
its solitude. The traveller may wander for days, and see and hear 
nothing : at least, the few sounds that fall upon his ear, such as the 
headlong crash of a decayed tree, or the far-ofi" song of some wandei'ing 
bird, do but render the prevailing silence all the deeper and more 
solemn. And at noon the feathered minstrels are still ; even the insect 
hum is hushed ; and all the sweet cadences which make our English 
woodlands cheerful are wanting. The result is a strange feeling of 
awe, which, as well as that of loneliness, weighs heavily upon the mind; 
and, until the traveller grows accustomed to it, prevents him from 
exercising fully his faculties of observation and inquirj*. It is unfortu- 
nate for the virgin forest that it has had no poets. Otherwise, with 
what glorious shapes might its leafy depths have been peopled ! What 
wild romantic legends would naturally have been associated with its 
colossal trees and its exuberant vegetation ! Surely its spirits would 
have exceeded in marvel and beauty the oreads and satyrs and wood- 
nymphs of the tamer groves of Greece and Italy. What was Ai'cadia, 
what was Tempe, to the charmed glades, and stately avenues, and 
blooming garden-bowers of the forests of the Amazons ? 
An animated picture of the life that abounds on the threshold of 
the forest, in the neighbourhood of the creeks and streams that are 
thrown off from the great river, is furnished by modern writers. Birds, 
we are told, of brightest plumage, flutter and dart through the trees. 
The motmot repeats its two-s^dlabled name with astonishing rapidity. 
