of purple buds.  That is an ‘Angelim’; {79b} when full-grown, one of the finest timbers in the world.  And what are those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub?  Verily, again, we are in the Tropics.  They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern.  The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year’s leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut.  But these are not cocos.  The last year’s leaves of the coco are rich yellow, and its stem is curved.  These are groo-groos; {79c} they stand as fresh proofs that we are indeed in the Tropics, and as ‘a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’

For it is a joy for ever, a sight never to be forgotten, to have once seen palms, breaking through and, as it were, defying the soft rounded forms of the broad-leaved vegetation by the stern grace of their simple lines; the immovable pillar-stem looking the more immovable beneath the toss and lash and flicker of the long leaves, as they awake out of their sunlit sleep, and rage impatiently for a while before the mountain gusts, and fall asleep again.  Like a Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room, sharp cut, cold, virginal; shaming, by the grandeur of mere form, the voluptuousness of mere colour, however rich and harmonious; so stands the palm in the forest; to be worshipped rather than to be loved.  Look at the drawings of the Oreodoxa-avenue at Rio, in M. Agassiz’s charming book.  Would that you could see actually such avenues, even from the sea, as we have seen them in St. Vincent and Guadaloupe:  but look at the mere pictures of them in that book, and you will sympathise, surely, with our new palm-worship.

And lastly, what is that giant tree which almost fills the centre of the glen, towering with upright but branching limbs, and huge crown, thinly leaved, double the height of all the trees around?  An ash?  Something like an ash in growth; but when you look at it through the glasses (indispensable in the tropic forest), you see that the foliage is more like that of the yellow horse-chestnut.  And no British ash, not even the Altyre giants, ever reached to half that bulk.  It is a Silk-cotton tree; a Ceiba {79d}—­say, rather, the Ceiba of the glen; for these glens have a habit of holding each one great Ceiba, which has taken its stand at the upper end, just where the mountain-spurs run together in an amphitheatre; and being favoured (it may be supposed) by the special richness of the down-washed soil at that spot, grows to one of those vast air-gardens of creepers and parasites of which we have so often read and dreamed.  Such a one is this:  but we will not go up to it now.  This sketch shall be completed by the background of green and gray, fading aloft into tender cobalt:  the