416 EXCURSIONS BEYOND EGA. Chap. YI. 
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. 
Pictures of startling clearness rose up of the gloomy 
winters, the long grey 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 conventionalities. 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 boundless 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 beautv, to sail towards the North 
Pole, where lay my home under crepuscular skies some- 
where about fifty-two degrees of latitude. It was natural- 
to feel a little dismayed at the prospect of so great a 
change, but now, after three years of renewed experience 
of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilised 
life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant 
nourishment, to the spiritual sterility of half-savage 
existence, even if it were passed in the garden of Eden. 
