LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
SSI 
Free as the air, that “ chartered libertine/” the world appears 
as, if it were, given to him, to roam whithersoever his fancy leads 
him, or his wants impel him. A stranger to all the delights 
and pleasures of local attachments, he scarcely knows the mean¬ 
ing of those endearing words, “ my home,” for the dwelling of 
to-day is not the dwelling of to-morrow; allied with no pleas¬ 
ing associations; with no remembrances, which have called forth 
the affections of his heart, and which are entwined around it as 
the links of a chain, which is never to be broken, but by death; 
with no flowers that he has reared ; no tree that he has planted, 
which in happier climes, and to more favored beings, are as 
the silent monitors of juvenile happiness, or wffiich have ob¬ 
tained a value in our eyes, as having been planted by a hand 
that once was dear to us ; to these and all such heavenly feel¬ 
ings, which sublimate our nature, and bring us nearer akin to 
higher spirits; the semi-animal of the hyperborean regions, is 
an entire stranger; and yet, in his breast glows in a certain de¬ 
gree the amor fatrice, as warmly and as ardently as in the 
breast of the natives of the most favored climes of Europe; 
but it is a wise dispensation of Heaven, that it should be so ; for 
a very slight knowledge of the physiology of man informs us, 
that the natives of the two extremes of climate, if transported 
to the opposite one in which they were bred, w r ould not long 
survive the change; an Esquimaux w r ould perish on the shores 
of the Congo, and a Negro would not long be in existence 
amid the desolate snows of Spitzbergen. It is only the men 
and animals, which have their centre of dominion in temperate 
countries, that are capable of enduring the most widely ex¬ 
tended geographical distribution. A native of Britain can by 
degrees naturalize himself to any climate of the world ; he can 
brave alike the most fiery breath of the torrid zone, and the 
frozen climes of Baffin’s Bay; but transport an Esquimaux to 
between the tropics, and his apparently hardy constitution, 
would sink under the enervating heat. 
It is similarly constituted with the animals,, for by an 
admirable law' of divine benevolence, all those animals, from 
