Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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When, As The Moon Was Going Down Behind The Mountains
Of Uniana, Her Reddish Disc Was Hidden Behind The Pinnated
Foliage of
the palm-trees, and again appeared in the aerial zone that separates
the two forests, I thought myself
Transported for a few moments to the
hermitage which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has described as one of the
most delicious scenes of the Isle of Bourbon, and I felt how much the
aspect of the plants and their groupings resembled each other in the
two worlds. In describing a small spot of land in an island of the
Indian Ocean, the inimitable author of Paul and Virginia has sketched
the vast picture of the landscape of the tropics. He knew how to paint
nature, not because he had studied it scientifically, but because he
felt it in all its harmonious analogies of forms, colours, and
interior powers.
East of the Atures, near these rounded mountains crowned, as it were,
by two superimposed forests of laurels and palms, other mountains of a
very different aspect arise. Their ridge is bristled with pointed
rocks, towering like pillars above the summits of the trees and
shrubs. These effects are common to all granitic table-lands, at the
Harz, in the metalliferous mountains of Bohemia, in Galicia, on the
limit of the two Castiles, or wherever a granite of new formation
appears above the ground. The rocks, which are at distances from each
other, are composed of blocks piled together, or divided into regular
and horizontal beds.
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