Columbus has left us some charming descriptions of his own discoveries;
though it is only recently that we have obtained the knowledge of his
own ship's journal, of his letters to the treasurer Sanchez, to Donna
Juana de la Torre, governess of the infant Don Juan, and to Queen
Isabella. Humboldt has sought to show with how deep a feeling and
perception of the forms and the beauty of nature the great discoverer
was endowed, and how he described the face of the earth, and the "new
heaven" which opened to his view, with a beauty and simplicity of
expression which can only be fully appreciated by those who are familiar
with the ancient force of the language as it existed at the period.
The aspect and the physiognomy of the vegetation, the impenetrable
thickets of the forest, "in which one can hardly distinguish which are
the flowers and leaves belonging to each stem;" the wild luxuriance
which clothed the humid shores; the rose-coloured flamingoes fishing at
the mouth of the rivers in the early morning, and giving animation to
the landscape, attract the attention of the old navigator while sailing
along the coast of Cuba, between the small Lucayan islands and the
Jardinillos. Each newly-discovered land appears to him still more
beautiful than those he had before described; he complains that he
cannot find words in which to record the sweet impressions which he has
received.
"The loveliness of this new land," says the discoverer, "far surpasses
that of the Campina de Cordoba. The trees are all bright with
ever-verdant foliage, and perpetually laden with fruits. The plants on
the ground are tall and full of blossoms. The breezes are mild like
those in April in Castille; the nightingales sing more sweetly than I
can describe. At night, other small birds sing sweetly, and I also hear
our grasshoppers and frogs. Once I came into a deeply-enclosed harbour,
and saw high mountains which no human eye had seen before, from which
lovely waters streamed down. The mountain was covered with firs, pines,
and other trees of very various form, and adorned with beautiful
flowers. Ascending the river, which poured itself into the bay, I was
astonished at the cool shade, the crystal clear water, and the number of
singing birds. It seemed as if I could never quit a spot so
delightful--as if a thousand tongues would fail to describe it, as if
the spell-bound hand would refuse to write."
We have here, from the journal of an unlettered seaman, the power which
the beauty of nature, manifested in her individual forms, may exert on a
susceptible mind. Feelings ennoble language; for the prose of the
admiral, especially when, on his fourth voyage, at the age of 67, he
relates his wonderful dream on the coast of Veragua, is, if not more
eloquent, yet far more moving, than the allegorical pastoral romance of
Boccacio and the two Arcadias of Sannazaro and Sydney; than Garcilasso's
Salicio y Nemoroso; or than the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.
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EARLY INCITEMENTS TO A SCIENTIFIC STUDY
OF NATURE.
Baron Humboldt, in the opening of his _Cosmos_, vol. ii., recalls the
lessons of experience, which tell us how often impressions received by
the senses from circumstances, seemingly accidental, have so acted on
the youthful mind as to determine the whole direction of the man's
course through life. Childish pleasure, in the form of countries and of
seas, as delineated in maps; the desire to behold those southern
constellations which have never risen in our horizon; the sight of palms
and of the cedars of Lebanon, figured in a pictorial Bible, may have
implanted in the spirit the first impulse to travel in distant lands.
"If I might (says Humboldt) have recourse to my own experience, and say
what awakened in me the first beginnings of an inextinguishable longing
to visit the tropics, I should name George Forster's descriptions of the
islands of the Pacific--paintings, by Hodge, in the house of Warren
Hastings, in London, representing the banks of the Ganges--and a
colossal dragon-tree in an old tower of the Botanic Gardens at Berlin."
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