内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. This, however, is but one feature; there is another. Let us revert back to the soil and we shall see the second added to the first. This time, again, it is thq physical structure of the country which has stamped the intellect of the race with that which we find in its labors and in its history. There is in this country nothing of the vast or gigantic; outward .objects possess no disproportionate, overwhelming dimensions. We see nothing there like the huge Himalaya, nothing like those boundless entanglements of rank vegetation, those enormous rivers described in Indian poems; there is nothing like the interminable forests, limitless plains and the wild and shoreless ocean of Northern Europe. The eye there seizes the forms of objects without difficulty and retains a precise image of them; every object is medial, proportioned, easily and clearly perceptible to the senses. The mountains of Corinth, Attica, Bccotia and the Peloponnesus arefrom three to four thousand feet high; only a few reach six thousand; you must go to the extreme north of Greece to find a summit like those of the Alps and the Pyrenees, and then it is Olympus, of which they make the home of the gods. The Ee- neus and the Achelous, the largest rivers, are, at most, but thirty or forty leagues long; the others, usually, are mere brooks and torrents. The sea itself, so terrible and threatening at the north, is here a sort of lake; we have no feeling of the solitude ' of immensity; some waste or ' iland is always in sight; it does not leave on the mind a sinister impression; it does not appear like a ferocious and destructive being; it has no leaden, pallid and cadaverous hue; the coasts are not ravaged by it and it has no tides strewing them with mire and stony fragments. It is lustrous, ...