Yes.  The mind of man is not so “infinite,” in the vulgar sense of that word, as people fancy; and however greedy the appetite for wonder may be, while it remains unsatisfied in everyday European life, it is as easily satiated as any other appetite, and then leaves the senses of its possessor as dull as those of a city gourmand after a lord mayor’s feast.  Only the highest minds—­our Humboldts, and Bonplands, and Schomburgks (and they only when quickened to an almost unhealthy activity by civilization)—­can go on long appreciating where Nature is insatiable, imperious, maddening, in her demands on our admiration.  The very power of observing wears out under the rush of ever new objects; and the dizzy spectator is fain at last to shut the eyes of his soul, and take refuge (as West Indian Spaniards do) in tobacco and stupidity.  The man, too, who has not only eyes but utterance,—­what shall he do where all words fail him?  Superlatives are but inarticulate, after all, and give no pictures even of size any more than do numbers of feet and yards:  and yet what else can we do, but heap superlative on superlative, and cry, “Wonderful, wonderful!” and after that, “wonderful, past all whooping”?  What Humboldt’s self cannot paint, we will not try to daub.  The voyagers were in a South American forest, readers.  Fill up the meaning of those words, each as your knowledge enables you, for I cannot do it for you.

Certainly those adventurers could not.  The absence of any attempt at word-painting, even of admiration at the glorious things which they saw, is most remarkable in all early voyagers, both Spanish and English.  The only two exceptions which I recollect are Columbus—­(but then all was new, and he was bound to tell what he had seen)—­and Raleigh; the two most gifted men, perhaps, with the exception of Humboldt, who ever set foot in tropical America; but even they dare nothing but a few feeble hints in passing.  Their souls had been dazzled and stunned by a great glory.  Coming out of our European Nature into that tropic one, they had felt like Plato’s men, bred in the twilight cavern, and then suddenly turned round to the broad blaze of day; they had seen things awful and unspeakable:  why talk of them, except to say with the Turks, “God is great!”

So it was with these men.  Among the higher-hearted of them, the grandeur and the glory around had attuned their spirits to itself, and kept up in them a lofty, heroical, reverent frame of mind; but they knew as little about the trees and animals in an “artistic” or “critical” point of view, as in a scientific one.  This tree the Indians called one unpronounceable name, and it made good bows; that, some other name, and it made good canoes; of that, you could eat the fruit; that produced the caoutchouc gum, useful for a hundred matters; that was what the Indians (and they likewise) used to poison their arrows with; from the ashes of those palm-nuts you could make good salt; that tree, again, was full of good milk if you bored