HUMBOLDT'S COSMOS.
THE first volume of this remarkable work presented the phtenomena of the universe as rigorous science describes them. The " Triumphant arch, that Mfg the sky
When storms prepare to part,"
would not be touched off with the feeling and fancy of a poet, but de- scribed by the "proud philosophy" explaining " the cold material laws" which the poet deprecates. In like manner, the more remarkable features of the Cosmos would be exhibited not as they appear to man the spec- tator or observer, but to man the inquirer—the senses of the individual would be corrected by philosophical experiment and proof. In the vo- lume before us, this rigorous science is done with, and the author con- siders " the impression which the image received by the external senses produces on the feelings, and on the poetic and imaginative faculties of mankind. An inward world here opens to the view, into which we de- sire to penetrate; not, however, for the purpose of investigating, &c. • ** but that we may trace the sources of that animated contemplation which enhances a genuine enjoyment of nature, and discover the particular causes which, in modern times especially, have so powerfully promoted, through the medium of the imagination, a predilection for the study of nature and for the undertaking of distant voyages."
To carry out this idea, Humboldt first takes a rapid survey of the lite- rature of the world—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Oriental, Italian, English, and German—for the purpose of observing the manner in which poets and imaginative or descriptive writers of different countries and in dif- ferent ages have exhibited natural images in their works, and the feelings which they have endeavoured to excite by means of such images in the minds of their readers. Of course this survey is curt and cursory, aiming at merely indicating the general characteristics of literature, so far as natural description is in question; but it exhibits a large acquaintance with the belles lettres, and a nice appreciation of subtile qualities and excellencies, combining at once the exact knowledge of the physical philo- sopher and the metaphysical acumen of the critic. Besides making the reader acquainted with some of the moat remarkable descriptive passages in the greatest works, it undesignedly raises, and as undesignedly settles, we think, the question that pure description only prevails in the decline of art, and is itself a proof if not a cause of the decline. It was not, Humboldt considers, that the ancient or the early modern poets were in- sensible to the beauties of nature—quite the contrary; but they were occupieti with the incidents of life and the passions of men, natural ob- jects 04 appearing incidentally and as a sort-of baekgronnd to the figures and the action. "If it be true, ae we have remarked, that natural descriptions, whether of the richness and luxuriance of Southern vegetation, or the portraiture in fresh and vivid colours of the habits of animals, have only become a distinct branch of literatuie in very modern times, it was not that sensibility to the belifty of nature was absent where the perception of beauty was so intense, or the animated ex- pression of a contemplative poetic spirit wanting where the creative power of the Hellenic mind produced inimitable master-works in poetry and in the plastic arts. The deficiency which appears to our modern ideas in this department of an- tiquity, betokens not so mach a want of sensibility as the absence of a prevailing impulse to disclose in words the feeling of natural beauty. Directed less to the inanimate world of phrenomena than to that of human action, and of the in- ternal spontaneous emotions, the earliest and the noblest developments of the poetic spirit were epical and lyrical. These were forms in which natural descrip- tions could only hold a subordinate, and, as it were, an accidental place, and could not appear as distinct productions of the imagination. As the influence of an- tiquity. gradually declined, and as its blossoms faded, the rhetorical spirit showed itself in descriptive as well as in didactic poetry; and the latter, which in its earlier philosophical and semi-priestly character had been severe, grand, and unadorned, as in Empedoeles" Poem of Nature,' gradually lost its early simple
dignity. • "When the true poetry of Greece expired with Grecian liberty, that which remained became descriptive, didactic, instructive: astronomy, geography, and the arts of the hunter and the fisherman, appeared in the age of Alexander and his successors as objects of poetry, and were indeed often adorned with much metrical skill. The forms and habits of animals are described with grace, and often with such exactness that our modern classifying natural historians can recognize genera and even species. But in none of these writings can we dis- cover the presence of that inner life—that inspired contemplation—whereby to the poet, almost unconsciously to himself, the external world becomes a subject of the imagination."
And again, quoting the manuscript correspondence of his friend Lud- wig Tieck-
• Shakspere, who amidst the pressure of his animated action has scarcely ever time and opportunity to introduce deliberate descriptions of natural scenes, does yet so paint them by occurrences, by allusions, and by the emotions of the acting personages, that we seem to see them before our eyes, and to live in them. We thus live in the midsummer night in the wood; and in the latter scenes of the Merchant of Venice we see the moonshine brightening the warm summer night, without direct descriptions. An actual and deliberate description of a na- tural scene occurs, however, in King Lear; where Edgar who feigns himself mad, represents to his blind father Gloucester, while on the plain, that they are mount- ing to the summit of Dover Cliffi The picture drawn of the downward view into the depths below actually turns one giddy." The review of literature, so far as it is connected with the description of natural objects, forms, however, but one section and that a small one of Cosmos: landscape painting and the cultivation of exotic plants follow it, and indeed form a part of the first division of the work under the title of " Poetic Descriptions of Nature." The second and largest division contains what the author terms a history of the physical contemplation of the universe,—in other words, a history of geographical discovery and geographical science, from the earliest period till the voyages of Columbus awl:Yahoo de Game, with, the circumnavigation of the globe by Magda las, left little more to discover ; and these geographical accounts are fol- lowed by a sketch of the celestial discoveries consequent upon the inven- tion of the telescope. _,Idince Robertson's summary account of ancient commerce and maritime dsOovery, in his Dissertation on India and his introduction to the His- tory of America, the progress of geographical science and of man's gra- dual knowledge of the earth has been frequently handled. One of the most complete and comprehensive attempts of this character was by Mr. Cooley in the Maritime and Inland Discovery, published in Lardner's Cyclopiedia; which, though indebted to Robertson and others for the general idea and a ready reference to authorities, contains perhaps the fullest account Of the subject extant, for those in want of infer nation. That book, how- ever, able as it is, was only compiled : Humboldt's is the rapid survey of a master-mind, combining in itself a wide and deep scholarship with the accu- rate science of a physical philosopher and the penetrative acumen of the cri- tic; and to these qualities, rare in themselves, he adds the still rarer qua- lity ofavoetical mind, which animates the wonders of nature or the struggles Of art by the force of eloquence and the colours of the imagination, Neither is Cosmos a task of suggestion, or a new labour of love. It is the result of many other works—of many labours in the body, of life- lug philosophical experiments and speculations, and of the literary recreations of Alexander von Humboldt. Into. Cosmos he has thrown the pith of his travels, his studies, and his reading ; so that we have the quintessence of his welhstored mind, upon a subject whieh has not.only aerioualy engaged it, but to which he has made even his lighter reading subservient. Even this collateral or incidental reading he has pursued with a zeal and an acumen which only great and original minds exhibit. In perusing an ancient author, he fastens at once upon the point which contributed to advance our knowledge, and often selects from obscure or Ilegleeted writings the germ of speculations and discoveries which it was reserved for modern times to establish.
Nor is a history of discovery the only object of the Cosmos. It em- braces the history of scientific literature, and those tiaras of exoitemept in the human mind which led to discovery and advanced science. Dealing, how- ever, with the reflection of Nature in books, rather than with Nature her- self,, it does not supply so much matter as did the first volume for sepa- rate exhibition, although the interest of continuous perusal is equally great. Of this separable matter we take a. couple of passages.
INFLUENCE OF TRADE.
The amber trade, which was probably first directed to the West Cirobrian coasts, and only subsequently to the Baltic and the country of the Esthonians, owes its first origin to the boldness and perseverance of Plecemcian coast naviga. tors. In its subsequent extension, it offers, in the point of view of which we are treating, a remarkable instance of influence which may be exerted by a predi- lection for even a single foreign production in opening an inland trade between nations and in making known large tracts of country. In the same way that the Phoerean Massilians brought the British tin across France to the Rhone, the amber was conveyed from people to people through Germany, and by, the Celts on either declivity of the Alps to the Pallas, and through Pannonia to the Borys- thenes. It was this inland truffle which first brought the coasts of the Northern Paean into connexion with the Euxine and the Adriatic.
EARLY ENCYCLOWEVIAR.
The difficulties which, before the invention of printing, the expense of copyists opposed to the assemblage of many separate manuscripts, prodOced in the middle ages, when after the thirteenth century the circle of ideas began to enlarge, a great predilection for encyclopredie works. These works are deserving of parti- cular attention in this place, because they led to the generalization of views. There appeared in succession, one work being in great measure founded on its predecessors, the twenty books De Reruns Nature of Thomas Cantipratensis, Professor at Louvain in 1280; the Mirror of Nature (Speculum Naturale) which Vincent of Beauvais (Bellovacensis) wrote for St. Lewis and his consort Marga- ret of Provence in 1250; the "Book of Nature" of Conrad of Meygenberg, aCar- dinalest at Regensburg in 1349; and the "Picture of the World" (Imago Mundi) o Petrus de Alliaco, Bishop of Cambray, in 1410. These encyclopaedias were the precursors of the t Margarita Philosophica of Father Reisch; the first edi-
tion of which ap in 1486, and which for half' a century promoted in a re-
markable manner the extension of knowledge. We must here dwell a little more particularly on the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Alliacus (Pierre d'Ailly). I have shown elsewhere that this work was more influential on the discovery of America than was the correspondence with the learned Florentine Toscanelli. All that Co- lumbus knew of Greek and Roman writers, all the passages. of Aristotle, Strabo, and Seneca, on the nearness of Eastern Asia to the Pillars of Hercules, which, as his son Don Fernando tells us, were what principally incited his father to the discovery of Indian lands, ("autoridad de los escritores pars mover al Almirante a descubrir las Indian,") were derived by the Admiral from the writings of Al- ike:am Columbus carried these writings with him on his voyages; • for, in a letter written to the Spanish Monarchs in October 1498 from Hayti, he translates word for word a passage from the Cardinal's treatise De Quantitate Tense Habitabilis, biL which he had been profoundly impressed. He probably did not know that ..011iacas had on his part transcribed, word for word from another earlier book, Roger Bacon's Opus Mains. Singular period, when a mixture of testimonies from Aristotle and Averroes (Avenryz), Esdras and Seneca, on the small extent of the wean compared with the magnitude of continental land, afforded to monarchs guarantees for the safety and expediency of costly enterprises!
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