And ever through tepid nights and azure days the _Guadeloupe_ rushes
on,--her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent of fire beneath
the stars,--steaming straight for the North.
Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,--beautiful Montserrat,
all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet fallen from the
waist!--breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth town behind its screen
of palms... young palms, slender and full of grace as creole children
are;--
And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling through
ocean-haze;--by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;--past ghostly
St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold, like some dream of the
Saint's own Second Summer;--
Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,--shark-haunted, bounded about by
huddling of little hills, blue and green.
Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"--all radiant with
verdure though well nigh woodless,--nakedly beautiful in the tropic
light as a perfect statue;--
Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the left,
and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,--old St. Thomas, watching
the going and the coming of the commerce that long since abandoned
her port,--watching the ships once humbly solicitous for patronage now
turning away to the Spanish rival, like ingrates forsaking a ruined
patrician;--
And the vapory Vision of, St. John;--and the grey ghost of Tortola,--and
further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the aureate phantom of Virgin
Gorda.