and ‘lovely,’ and ‘exquisite,’ and so forth; which are, after all, intellectually only one stage higher than the half-brute Wah! wah! with which the savage grunts his astonishment—­call it not admiration; epithets which are not, perhaps, intellectually as high as the ‘God is great’ of the Mussulman, who is wise enough not to attempt any analysis either of Nature or of his feelings about her; and wise enough also (not having the fear of Spinoza before his eyes) to ’in omni ignoto confugere ad Deum’—­in presence of the unknown to take refuge in God.

To describe to you, therefore, the Botanic Garden (in which the cottage stands) would take a week’s work of words, which would convey no images to your mind.  Let it be enough to say, that our favourite haunt in all the gardens is a little dry valley, beneath the loftiest group of trees.  At its entrance rises a great Tamarind, and a still greater Saman; both have leaves like a Mimosa--as the engraving shows.  Up its trunk a Cereus has reared itself, for some thirty feet at least; a climbing Seguine {83a} twines up it with leaves like ‘lords and ladies’; but the glory of the tree is that climbing palm, the feathers of which we saw crowning it from a distance.  Up into the highest branches and down again, and up again into the lower branches, and rolling along the ground in curves as that of a Boa bedecked with huge ferns and prickly spikes, six feet and more long each, the Rattan {83b} hangs in mid-air, one hardly sees how, beautiful and wonderful, beyond what clumsy words can tell.  Beneath the great trees (for here great trees grow freely beneath greater trees, and beneath greater trees again, delighting in the shade) is a group of young Mangosteens, {83c} looking, to describe the unknown by the known, like walnuts with leaflets eight inches long, their boughs clustered with yellow and green sour fruit; and beyond them stretches up the lawn a dense grove of nutmegs, like Portugal laurels, hung about with olive-yellow apples.  Here and there a nutmeg-apple has split, and shows within the delicate crimson caul of mace; or the nutmegs, the mace still clinging round them, lie scattered on the grass.  Under the perpetual shade of the evergreens haunt Heliconias and other delicate butterflies, who seem to dread the blaze outside, and flutter gently from leaf to leaf, their colouring—­which is usually black with markings of orange, crimson, or blue—­coming into strongest contrast with the uniform green of leaf and grass.  This is our favourite spot for entomologising, when the sun outside altogether forbids the least exertion.  Turn, with us—­alas! only in fancy—­out of the grove into a neighbouring path, between tea-shrubs, looking like privets with large myrtle flowers, and young clove-trees, covered with the groups of green buds which are the cloves of commerce; and among fruit-trees from every part of the Tropics, with the names of which I will