Note 11 — THE ANSAYRII.

The mere physical pleasure of the upper voyage has been thus described—"No words can convey an idea of the beauty and delightfulness of tropical weather, at least while any breeze from the north is blowing. There is a pleasure in the very act of breathing—a voluptuous consciousness that existence is a blessed thing: the pulse beats high, but calmly; the eye feels expanded; the chest heaves pleasureably, as if air was a delicious draught to thirsty lungs; and the mind takes its colouring and character from sensation. No thought of melancholy ever darkens over us—no painful sense of isolation or of loneliness, as day after day we pass on through silent deserts, upon the silent and solemn river. One seems, as it were, removed into another state of existence; and all the strifes and struggles of that from which we have emerged seem to fade, softened into indistinctness. This is what Homer and Alfred Tennyson knew that the lotus-eaters felt when they tasted of the mysterious tree of this country, and became weary of their wanderings:—

If the day, with all the tyranny of its sunshine and its innumerable insects, be enjoyable in the tropics, the night is still more so. The stars shine out with diamond brilliancy, and appear as large as if seen through a telescope. Their changing colours, the wake of light they cast upon the water, the distinctness of the milky way, and the splendour, above all, of the evening star, give one the impression of being under a different firmament from that to which we have been accustomed; then the cool delicious airs, with all the strange and stilly sounds they bear from the desert and the forest; the delicate scents they scatter, and the languid breathings with which they make our large white sails appear to pant, as they heave and languish softly over the water."—(The Crescent and the Cross, vol. i. p. 210.)