putrefied trunks, in a dust that has no name! Here indeed it is
that one can get some comprehension of what vegetable antiquity
signifies;--a lurid light (_lurida lux_), greenish, as wan at
noon as the light of the moon at midnight, confuses forms and
lends them a vague and fantastic aspect; a mephitic humidity
exhales from all parts; an odor of death prevails; and a calm
which is not silence (for the ear fancies it can hear the great
movement of composition and of decomposition perpetually going
on) tends to inspire you with that old mysterious horror which
the ancients felt in the primitive forests of Germany and of
Gaul:

"'Arboribus suus horror inest.'" *

* "Enquête sur le Serpent de la Martinique (Vipère Fer-de-Lance,
Bothrops Lancéolé, etc.)" Par le Docteur E. Rufz. 2 ed. 1859.
Paris: Germer-Ballière. pp. 55-57 (note).



XVII.


But the sense of awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly
greater than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the
North could ever have created. The brilliancy of colors that
seem almost preternatural; the vastness of the ocean of frondage,
and the violet blackness of rare gaps, revealing its in conceived
profundity; and the million mysterious sounds which make up its
perpetual murmur,--compel the idea of a creative force that