Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/307

 to disperse, but at such moments our field of view was again restricted by intervening heights.

The desire which we feel to behold certain objects does not depend solely on their grandeur, their beauty, or their importance; it is interwoven in each individual with many accidental impressions of his youth, with early predilection for particular occupations, with an attachment to the remote and distant, and with the love of an active and varied Life. The previous improbability of the fulfilment of a wish gives besides to its realisation a peculiar kind of charm. The traveller enjoys by anticipation the first sight of the constellation of the cross, and of the Magellanic clouds circling round the Southern Pole,—of the snow of the Chimborazo, and the column of smoke ascending from the volcano of Quito,—of the first grove of tree-ferns, and of the Pacific Ocean. The days on which such wishes are realised form epochs in life, and produce ineffaceable impressions; exciting feelings of which the vividness seeks not justification by processes of reasoning. With the longing which I felt for the first view of the Pacific from the crests of the Andes, there mingled the interest with which I had listened as a boy to the narrative of the adventurous expedition of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa,[18] the fortunate man who (followed by Francisco Pizarro) first among Europeans beheld from the heights of Quarequa, on the Isthmus of Panama, the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean,—the "South Sea." The reedy shores of the Caspian, at the place where I first saw them, i. e. from the Delta formed by the mouths of the Volga, cannot certainly be called pictu