very glad to quit Asia, the cradle of mankind, in which the
understanding has remained till now in its swaddling-clothes.
Astonishing is the immobility of Asiatic life, in the course of so many
centuries. Against Asia all attempts of improvement and civilization
have broken like waves; it seems not to belong to time, but to place.
The Indian Brahmin, the Chinese Mandarin, the Persian Bek, the mountain
Ouzdén, are unchanged--the same as they were two thousand years ago. A
sad truth! They represent, in themselves, a monotonous though varied, a
lively though soulless nature. The sword and the lash of the conqueror
have left on them, as on the water, no trace. Books, and the examples of
missionaries, have produced on them no influence. Sometimes, however,
they have made an exchange of vices; but never have they learned the
thoughts or the virtues of others. I quit the land of fruit to transport
myself to the land of labour--that great inventor of every thing useful,
that suggester of every thing great, that awakener of the soul of man,
which has fallen asleep here, and sleeps in weakness on the bosom of the
seducer--nature.

And truly, how seducing is nature here! Having ridden up the high
mountain to the left of Kiafir Koumík, I gazed with delight on the
gradually lighted summit of the Caucasus. I looked, and could not look
enough at them. What a wondrous beauty decks them as with a crown!
Another thin veil, woven of light and shadow, lay on the lower hill, but
the distant snows basked in the sky; and the sky, like a caressing
mother, bending over them its immeasurable bosom, fed them with the milk
of the clouds, carefully enfolding them with its swathe of mist, and
refreshing them with its gently-breathing wind. Oh, with what a flight
would my soul soar there, where a holy cold has stretched itself like a
boundary between the earthly and the heavenly! My heart prays and
thirsts to breathe the air of the inhabitants of the sky. I feel a wish