Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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The seaman ashore will note many of these beauties; but his superior officers will see more. The cottage ornée, to which they will be invited, with its lawn and flowering shrubs, tiny specimens of which we admire in hot-houses at home; the grass as green as that of England, and winding away in the cool shade of strange evergreens; the yellow cocoa-nut palms on the nearest spur of hill throwing back the tender blue of the distant mountains; groups of palms, with perhaps Erythrinas umbrosa (Bois immortelles, they call them in Trinidad), with vermilion flowers—trees of red coral, sixty feet high—interspersed; a glimpse beyond of the bright and sleeping sea, and the islands of the Bocas “floating in the shining waters,” and behind a luxuriously furnished cottage, where hospitality is not a mere name, but a very sound fact; what on earth can man want more?

Kingsley, in presence of the rich and luscious beauty, the vastness and repose, to be found in Trinidad, sees an understandable excuse for the tendency to somewhat grandiose language which tempts perpetually those who try to describe the tropics, and know well that they can only fail. He says: “In presence of such forms and such colouring as this, one becomes painfully sensible of the poverty of words, and the futility, therefore, of all word-painting; of the inability, too, of the senses to discern and define objects of such vast variety; of our æsthetic barbarism, in fact, which has no choice of epithets, save such as ‘great,’ and ‘vast,’ and ‘gigantic;’ between such as ‘beautiful,’ and ‘lovely,’ and ‘exquisite,’ and so forth: which are, after all, intellectually only one stage higher than the half-brute ‘Wah! wah!’ with which the savage grunts his astonishment—call it not admiration; epithets which are not, perhaps, intellectually as high as the ‘God is great!’ of the Mussulman, who is wise enough not to attempt any analysis, either of Nature or of his feelings about her, and wise enough, also … in presence of the unknown, to take refuge in God.”