Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XVII 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 oi country as have been portrayed in this narrativethrough 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 uncivilised, ignorant people, he is constantly being asked questions about the natural phenomena around him. He is thus made to realise 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 startingpoint 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. No one, indeed, who has been alone with Nature in her purest aspects, and seen her in so many different forms, can help pondering over her meanings; and though, in the strain and stress of travel, her deepest messages may =hap. Xvn] THE CALL OF THE STARS 313 not have reached my ear, now, in the after-calm, when I have all the varied scenes as vividly before me as on the day I saw them, and have, ...