- No One Can
Stand In These Solitudes Unmoved, And Not Feel That There Is
More In Man Than The Mere Breath Of His Body.
In calling
up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia
frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced
by all wretched and useless.
They can be described
only by negative characters; without habitations, without
water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely
a few dwarf plants. Why, then, and the case is not peculiar
to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on
my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener
and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind,
produced an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these
feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given
to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless,
for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown: they
bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, for ages,
and there appears no limit to their duration through future
time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was
surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts
heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these
last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep but ill-defined
sensations?
Lastly, of natural scenery, the views from lofty mountains,
through certainly in one sense not beautiful, are very
memorable. When looking down from the highest crest of the
Cordillera, the mind, undisturbed by minute details, was
filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses.
Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to
create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of
a barbarian - of man in his lowest and most savage state.
One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks,
could our progenitors have been men like these? - men,
whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us
than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not
possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast
of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that
reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint
the difference between savage and civilized man. It is
the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part
of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which
would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert,
the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros
wandering over the wild plains of Africa.
Among the other most remarkable spectacles which we
have beheld, may be ranked, the Southern Cross, the cloud
of Magellan, and the other constellations of the southern
hemisphere - the water-spout - the glacier leading its blue
stream of ice, overhanging the sea in a bold precipice - a
lagoon-island raised by the reef-building corals - an active
volcano - and the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake.
These latter phenomena, perhaps, possess for me a
peculiar interest, from their intimate connection with the
geological structure of the world.
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