Peninsula

“ The ever-varying lights of the Peninsula, and the splendid Malayan sky that arches over us are, in themselves, at once the crown of our glory, and the imparters of a fresh and changeful loveliness to the splendours of the earth. Our eyes are ever glutted with the wonders of the sky, and of the lights which are shed around us. ”

“ A long jagged peninsula, where barren heights and cactus-clad mesas glow in the biting rays of an unobscured sun, where water holes are accorded locations on the maps, and where, under the fluttering shade of fluted palm boughs, life becomes a siesta dream. ”

“ The site upon which the young and growing city stands is one of the most picturesque in the southern hemisphere. It is bounded on the east by the beautiful land-locked bay, and beyond by the Peninsula—famed for its fertile and productive soil, over which the rising sun sheds his fructifying rays, and lights up the church spires and the tall smoking factory chimneys. ”

“ You have already gathered that the peninsula is difficult to traverse even in times of peace; the few dwellers on it make most of their journeys from point to point by water. Except in a few valleys, there are no cultivated fields; and save for a few cypress and olive groves, the whole peninsula consists of bare or scrub-covered hills and ravines filled with jungle. ”

“ This peninsula was a fair and fertile country inhabited by rich and civilized nations, a people versed in the arts of war and civilization—a country covered with large cities and magnificent palaces, their rulers according to tradition reigning not only on the Atlantic Continent, but over islands far and near, even into Europe and Asia. ”

“ This renders them so abundant in such districts as the Greek peninsula. There, Alpine tracts of territory collect from the atmosphere the vapors of the contiguous sea, arrest the castellated glories of cloudland, and awaken in the valleys and plains the refreshing music “of the voice of many waters.” The commerce of kingdoms distinguishes not the rivers of this classic soil, but they are familiar with the charms of nature, add effect to the sublime and wild in its scenery, and clothe with heightened grace the soft and pastoral. ”

“ All the region towards the south, till you come to the great peninsula, is green, and full of flowers; over the whole region stand built grand palaces, as in the north, three versts apart, like numberless, great chessmen on a mighty chessboard. ”

“ Few countries of the globe present to the eye of the traveller so desolate, so forbidding an aspect as that vast and arid peninsula which, embracing an area of more than a million square miles, stretches away through twenty-four degrees of latitude, from the confines of the Syrian Desert to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Its surface, while far from possessing the monotonous character with which popular fancy is accustomed to invest it, is, for the greater part of its extent, destitute of those physical advantages which tempt either the cupidity or the enterprise of man. ”

“ The isolating and intermediary aspects can be traced in the anthropo-geographical effects of every peninsula, even those which, like Brittany and Cornwall, project into the long uncharted waste of the Atlantic. In the order of historical development, a peninsula first isolates, until in its secluded environment it has molded a mature, independent people; then, as that people outgrows its narrow territory, the peninsula becomes a favorable base for maritime expansion to distant lands, or becomes a natural avenue for numerous reciprocal relations with neighboring lands beyond. ”

“ One thing I shall always believe, and it is that Doe found on the Peninsula that intense life, that life of multiplied sensations, which he always craved in the days when he said: "I want to have lived." ”

“ It is probable, that a country gifted like this peninsula, with a fertile soil, incomparable climate, and unusual charms of scenery, attracted the attention of its neighbours, and sometimes allured them from less favoured settlements. ”

“ The main road running south to Rose Head from Rosemarket cuts the peninsula into two unequal portions, the eastern and by far the larger of which consists of a flat tableland two or three hundred feet above the sea covered with a bushy heath, which flourishes in the magnesian soil and which when in bloom is of such a clear rosy pink, with nothing to break the level monochrome except scattered drifts of cotton grass, pools of silver water and a few stunted pines, that ignorant observers have often supposed that the colour gave its name to the whole peninsula. ”

“ About all the two peninsulas lie blue waters, the inland seas, lakes Michigan, Superior and Huron. Upon the upper peninsula are great mineral ranges, copper and iron, a stunted but sturdy forest growth, and hundreds of little lakelets. The lower peninsula, at its apex, is yet largely unclaimed from nature, but, toward the south, broadens out into the great area of grain and apple blossoms, and big, natty towns, once the country of oak openings, the haunt of Pontiac and of Tecumseh, braided and crossed by one of Cooper's romances. ”

“ An Island is a part of land encompassed round with water.
3. A Peninsula, called also Chersonesus, is a piece of dry land every where environed with water, save only a narrow neck of land adjoining the same to the Continent.
4. An Isthmus is that narrow neck of land which joins the Peninsula to the Continent, by which people go from one to the other.
5. A Promontory is a high piece of land, stretching out into the sea, the extremity whereof is commonly called a Cape.
6. A Mountain is a rising part of dry land, overtopping the adjacent country, and appearing the first at a distance. ”

“ In the lower peninsula not only have settlements surrounded the head of the peninsula, but there remains only a small body of unsettled lands in the interior, the vast pine forests having been swept away by the activity of the lumbering industry. ”

“ The position and configuration of this peninsula may be seen upon the map. It is formed in some respect like a human foot, with the heel toward the sea. Of course, the ankle of the foot is the isthmus which connects the peninsula with the main land. The length of this peninsula, from north to south, is five or six miles. Our observers, from their lofty position at En-gedi, looked down upon it, and could trace almost the whole of its outline. North of it, too, there was a valley, which opened up among the mountains to the eastward, called the Valley of Kerak. ”

“ Wherever one's footsteps wander, be it in the progressive provinces of the north, the mediævalism of the Great Plain, or in that still eastern portion of the south, Andalusia, this one thing is ever omnipresent and stamps itself on the memory as the great living force throughout the Peninsula. ”

“ No human prevision could have foreseen such a calamity. He meant to build upon a rock, and he had not even built upon sand. The peninsula of Victoria, which the best maps of English America join to the American continent, had been torn suddenly away from it. This peninsula was in fact nothing but an immense piece of ice, five hundred square miles in extent, converted by successive deposits of sand and earth into apparently solid ground well clothed with vegetation. ”

“ Like the northern peninsula, it is also surrounded with a multitude of islands, which are so crowded together, especially on its eastern coast, as to make an archipelago. It is impossible to look at the map of Europe, and not be struck with the resemblance in these particulars between its northern and southern geography. ”

“ The first thing I discovered was that it has about forty million people living within the limits of the peninsula, close to half the population of the United States. Does that sound as if it might be China's appendix? You wouldn't think so if you saw the cities, roads and fields of this great stretch of land literally swarming with human [167] beings, and every last one of them, as busy as ants.
I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I happened to be traveling with a man from Kansas. He was a man interested in farming and wheat-growing. ”

“ The guide books that so harshly criticise, saying hers is a land where Nature has lavished her prodigalities of soil and climate yet shiftless man has refused her bounty, seem to forget that only one-fourth of the country is the traditional rich south. The fruitful provinces form but the fringe of the Peninsula. ”

“ This rocky peninsula is truly a very wild and unworldlike little territory, jutting boldly out as it does into the mighty bay of Massachusetts, and commanding a view of its whole extent, from Cape Cod to Cape Anne, together with the many islands, towns, and villages scattered along the coast; whilst in front spreads out the Atlantic Ocean.
To sit within the upper gallery of this house upon the cliff, and watch the rising moon fling her golden bridge from the far horizon's edge, until it seems to rest upon the beach below, is a sight which would be worth something in a poet or a painter's eyes. ”

“ Throughout this long epoch western Europe is to be viewed as a peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the sea and stretching westward from the great land mass of eastern Europe and of Asia, which was the chief theatre of evolution both of animal and human life. ”

“ The land is drawing nearer—we can see the shape of the end promontory and peninsula—and a white speck like a church. The bulk of the land is forlorn and rather shapeless, coming towards us: but attractive. ”

“ In the earliest epoch of which we have any record we find them established in a peninsula, which is on one hand upon the very borders of Asia, and upon another seems to hold out a hand to Africa by the innumerable islands which surround its shores. ”

“ All this part of the coast is barren and bleak; a barrier of rock seems to shut out the stranger from the celebrated peninsula which warlike nations have ravaged and commercial nations coveted. Richly gifted by Nature's liberal hand, it has always been an object of desire to the people of Europe and Asia. ”

“ The peninsula which Spain and Portugal divide between them is the part of western Europe least visited by Americans, although it stretches out like a friendly hand toward the western hemisphere and has furnished not only the discoverer of North America, but the colonizers of Central and South America. ”

“ The general aspect of the peninsula is described in the following terms by a modern tra- veller: — ** The peninsula is rugged, being intersected by innumerable ravines. The ground rises almost im- mediately and rather abruptly from the isthmus at the northern end to about 300 feet, and for the first twelve miles maintains a table -land elevation of about 600 feet, for the most part beautifully wooded. At this spot the peninsula is narrowed into rather less than two miles in breadth. ”

“ The Peninsula is a very different country, comprehending a few fertile districts only together with a vast deal of barren mountain—a country, according to a well-known saying, where small armies were beaten and large armies were starved. ”

“ The Peninsula had for centuries experienced the ascendency of different races of men, the successive predominance and decay of many forms of religious belief. The transmission of national peculiarities; the survival of various, often hostile, political and social opinions; the comparison of a series of creeds, each claiming divine origin and inspiration, yet each, in its turn, supplanted by a more powerful adversary, had disposed the minds of men to investigation and reason. It was only among the intellectual, however, that such a disposition prevailed. ”

“ The kingdom is a peninsula, terminated to the north-east by a ridge of mountains thirty miles high, which are altogether impassable, by reason of the volcanoes upon the tops: neither do the most learned know what sort of mortals inhabit beyond those mountains, or whether they be inhabited at all. ”

“ Whenever I am now called upon to discontinue my labours in the Peninsula, I shall comply without the slightest murmur or remonstrance, my heart being filled with gratitude to the Lord for having been permitted, useless vessel as I am, to see at least some of the seed springing up which during two years I have been casting on the stony ground of the interior of Spain. ”

“ Finally the peninsula of Asia Minor is formed by the western prolongations of the last-named chain, and of that of the Himalaya, under the names respectively of Taurus, for the chain along the S. side of the peninsula, and Antitaurus, Olympus, and other names, for the more broken portions of the northern chain. In fact the peninsula, from the Caucasus and Caspian to the Aegean, may be regarded as an almost continuous highland, formed by the union of the two chains. ”

“ But if the storm-racked peninsula could be granted a term of peaceful development, there is no doubt at all but that it would be much favoured by voyagers seeking picturesque beauty and wishing to go over the fields which have been the scenes of some of the greatest events in history. ”

“ In the long run, however, it has been pointed out that, if the culture of this region came from the south, its masters have come from the north;62 and its new masters of the eleventh century were to unify and consolidate it at the very time when the rest of the peninsula was breaking up into warring communes and principalities. ”

“ There is indeed little in the physical features of this portion of the great peninsula to excite the attention of the reader beyond the satisfaction that ever accompanies the victory of truth over fable, and a certain importance which in these “travelling times,”—when man appears rapidly rising to the rank of a migratory animal,—must attach to discovery. ”