tenance, the hospitality, and the very garments of the Arab.
The country consequently derives a fund of poetry from its natural circumstances and the special customs resulting from them. To arouse the poetic sense (which, like religious feeling, is a faculty of the human mind), we need the sight of beauty, of terrible power, of immensity of extent, of something vague and incomprehensible; for the fables of the imagination, the ideal world, begin only where the actual and the commonplace end.
Now, I inquire, what impressions must be made upon the inhabitant of the Argentine Republic by the simple act of fixing his eyes upon the horizon, and seeing nothing?—for the deeper his gaze sinks into that shifting, hazy, undefined horizon, the further it withdraws from him, the more it fascinates and confuses him, and plunges him in contemplation and doubt. What is the end of that world which he vainly seeks to penetrate? He knows not! What is there beyond what he sees? The wilderness, danger, the savage, death! Here is poetry already; he who moves among such scenes is assailed by fantastic doubts and fears, by dreams which possess his waking hours.
Hence it follows that the disposition and nature of the Argentine people are poetic. How can such feelings fail to exist, when a black storm-cloud rises, no one knows whence, in the midst of a calm, pleasant afternoon, and spreads over the sky before a word can be uttered? The traveller shudders as the crashing thunder announces the tempest, and holds his breath
