INTRODUCTION. 
9 
at hand when he will be able to revel at large in this Atlantic paradise, in remote 
spots seldom visited by strangers, and at altitudes where the fierce elements of 
winter shall give way at last to perpetual sunshine and the fresh breezes of a 
calmer sea. There is something amazingly luxurious in betaking oneself to Tent- 
life, after months of confinement and annoyance (it may he entirely,— 'partially 
it must be) in the heat and noise of Funchal. We are then perhaps more than 
ever open to the favourable impressions of an alpine existence;—and who can 
adequately tell the ecstasy of a first encampment on these invigorating hills! To 
turn out, morning after morning, in the solemn stillness of aerial forests,—where 
not a sound is heard, save ever and anon a woodman’s axe in some far-off tributary 
favine, or a stray bird hymning forth its matin song to the ascending sun; to feel 
the cool influence of the early dawn on the upland sward, and to mark the thin 
clouds of fleecy snow uniting gradually into a solid bank,—affording glimpses the 
while, as they join and separate, of the fair creation stretched out beneath; to 
smell the damp, cold vapour rising from the deep defiles around us, where vegeta¬ 
tion is still rampant on primaeval rocks and new generations of trees are springing 
up, untouched by man, from the decaying carcases of the old ones ; to listen in the 
still, calm evening air to the humming of the insect world (the most active tenants 
of these elevated tracts); and to mark, as the daylight wanes, the unnumbered 
orbs of night stealing one by one on to the -wide arch of heaven, as brilliant as 
they were on the first evening of their birth ;—are the lofty enjoyments, all, which 
the intellectual mind can grasp in these transcendent heights. 
It is needless however to pursue the picture further, for it is impossible to do 
justice to what experience alone can enable us to appreciate. And let not any 
one suppose that the varied objects and scenes of novelty which administer to our 
superior feelings, and charm the eye, in these upland solitudes are adapted only to 
the scrutiny of a naturalist, and are either beneath the notice of, or else cannot 
be sufficiently entered into by the general mass,—for such is by no means the 
case. A single trial, we are convinced, will be more than enough to prove the 
reverse, provided the adventurer be not altogether insensible to perceptions from 
without, or incurious as to the workings of the external universe around him. 
This however, we need scarcely add, is a sine qua non, —for it has been well said 
that “ he who wondereth at nothing hath no capabilities of bliss; but he that 
scrutinizeth trifles hath a store of pleasure to his hand: and happy and wise is the 
man to whose mind a trifle existeth not” 
The great expense necessarily attending the publication of a work like the 
present one will be a sufficient guarantee that it has been undertaken purely as a 
“ labour of love,” and with the sole aim (within its prescribed limits) of arriving 
at the truth. How far I have succeeded in this is a problem which must be 
solved by others : meanwhile I appeal boldly to observation, m situ, as the test by 
which I would most desire to be judged,—having but little fea* of the experiment, 
and believing that we are never in so favourable a position for deciding on the 
c 
