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0451 The heart of a continent : vol.1
The heart of a continent : vol.1 / Page 451 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000247
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

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CHAPTER XIX.

IMPRESSIONS OF TRAVEL.

"I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

WORDSWORTH.

To have travelled among such varied descriptions of country
as have been portrayed in this narrative—through desert,
forest, mountain, plain—and to have been brought in contact
with so many types of the human race, from the highly cultured
Hindoo to the rough tribesman of the Himalayas, without
forming some general impressions, would be impossible. When
a European travels among uncivilized, ignorant people, he is
constantly being asked questions about the natural phenomena
around him. He is thus made to realize how advanced our
knowledge of these phenomena is in comparison with that
possessed by semi-barbarians ; and in his solitary journeyings
he is incited to inquire into the meanings of what he sees, and,
looking backward from the starting-point of our knowledge, as
marked in the untutored people around him, and so thinking
of the store that has been acquired, his fancy inevitably wanders
into the fields of discovery to come.