I had heard and read much of the beauty of mountain scenery in the Tropics.

What I had heard and read is not exaggerated.

I saw, it is true, in this little island no Andes, with such a scenery among them and below them as Humboldt alone can describe--a type of the great and varied tropical world as utterly different from that of Trinidad as it is from that of Kent--or Siberia.

I had not even the chance of such a view as that from the Silla of Caraccas described by Humboldt, from which you look down at a height of nearly six thousand feet, through layer after layer of floating cloud, which increases the seeming distance to an awful depth, upon the blazing shores of the Northern Sea.
That view our host and his suite had seen themselves the year before; and they assured me that Humboldt had not overstated its grandeur.

The mountains of Trinidad do not much exceed three thousand feet in height, and I could hope at most to see among them what my fancy had pictured among the serrated chines and green gorges of St.Vincent, Guadaloupe, and St.Lucia, hanging gardens compared with which those of Babylon of old must have been Cockney mounds.