nly 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, though
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 lagoo