Whether his imagination, with all its activity, had quite th_Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist: Early Writings

LEAVES FROM THE

DIARY OF AN IMPRESSIONIST

EARLY WRITINGS

LAFCADIO HEARN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

FERRIS GREENSLET

1911

... Jeune artiste, tu attends un sujet? Tout est sujet; le

sujet c'est toi-même: ce sont tes impressions, tes emotions

devant la nature. C'est toi qu'il faut regarder, et non

autour de toi.

_Eugène Delacroix_.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FLORIDIAN REVERIES

TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

A TROPICAL INTERMEZZO

A NAME IN THE PLAZA

VULTUR AURA

CREOLE PAPERS

QUAINT NEW ORLEANS AND ITS HABITANTS

CREOLE WOMEN IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES

ARABESQUES

ARABIAN WOMEN

RABYAH'S LAST RIDE

INTRODUCTION

On a memorable day a good many years ago a certain sub-editor,

exploring the morning's mail, found his sense enthralled by a weird,

sad, delicious odor. Perfumes in the mail were not unheard-of: violets

there had been, and musk, and orange blossoms, and tobacco; and the

sub-editor, with a fantasy appropriate to his station, even prided

himself on his ability to close his eyes and pick out a California

contribution by the unaided sense of smell. But never before had there

been anything like this. Its chief essence was sandalwood, that was

clear, but sandalwood so etherealized and mingled with I know not

what of exotic scents that it gave to the imagination a provocative

ghostly thrill indescribable. The basket of the Muses, hastily tumbled,

disclosed a portentous envelope of straw color, with queer blue stamps

in one corner, and queer unknown characters in another; yet queerest of

all was the address in an odd orientalized hand, done with delicate,

curiously curving strokes of the pen. Within, in a script still less

Spencerian, these words met the sub-editor's excited eye:--

_The Dream of Akinosuké_

'In the district called Toïchi of Yamato province, there used to live

a gōshi named Miyata Akinosuké'; and so on through some twenty pages,

telling a mystical legend of old Japan in a lovely and melodious

English style.

This was the writer's first introduction to Lafcadio Hearn, known

to him up to that time only by a somewhat formidable repute as 'the

best interpreter of Japan,' and mentally scheduled for perusal on a

convenient opportunity which had never come. Since then Hearn's twenty

volumes have been read and reread; there has been correspondence with

his family and friends and with some who were not his friends; his

complicated life has been investigated in detail; yet the sharpness,

the intensity, of that first experience of his quality is not blurred.

The impression that persists is that of weird, sad, delicious savor, of

ghostly thrill.

This is not the place in which to retell in detail the romantic story

of Hearn's oddly characteristic life; but if we briefly recall its main

outlines in relation to the parallel outlines of his work; we shall

perhaps find an added interest and significance in the examples of his

early writing hereinafter collected.

Born in that Ionian Isle where Sappho destroyed herself for love; the

child of an Irishman and a Greek, with an added strain of gypsy bloody

Hearn first takes on a human tangibility when we find him deserted by

his parents and living in the ultra-religious household of a great-aunt

in Wales, a little dark-eyed, dark-faced, passionate boy, 'with a

wound in his heart and gold rings in his ears.' In the fragments of

autobiography dealing with this time, which Mrs. Wetmore has printed,

we find his visionary little mind occupied with highly significant

images,--the horrors of hell-fire, ghosts, and 'the breasts of nymphs

in the brake,' soon to be blotted out from the plates in his favorite

book by the priest who had his education in charge.

After a romantic though somewhat vague Odyssey of misfortune, Hearn

finally emerges in Cincinnati at the age of twenty as 'Old Semi-Colon'

a proof-reader and budding journalist by profession, a 'flame-hearted'

artist in words by aspiration. His appearance at this time, as a

striking bearded portrait shows, was that of a Parisian poet not yet

'arrived'; and that side of his temperament, which later made him style

himself, half in irony, half in penitence, 'a vicious, French-hearted

scalawag,' was then, perhaps, most restive. He attended spiritualistic

séances, he tried a little opium, and made other fantastic experiments

in life. But these are topics that need not concern us here. The

important point is that with the Cincinnati period the tale of Hearn's

career as a literary artist begins. He devours' Hoffmann and writes

marvelous murder-stories for the Sunday edition of his paper; he

studies the methods of those great _prosateurs_, Flaubert and Gautier;

and finally, before leaving Cincinnati in 1877, he completes the

translation of the tales of Gautier which he published some years later

as 'One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances.'

In conveying the flavor of a strongly-flavored writer the work

was singularly successful. It was dedicated 'To the lovers of the

loveliness of the antique world, the lovers of artistic beauty and

artistic truth.' A dedication to the lovers of _macabre_ would have

been more appropriate. In his choice of tales, in his gusto in the

rendering of certain passages, in the 'flowers of the yew' which

he thought best to add in an appendix, Hearn showed himself more

macabresque than his master.

In 1877, Hearn, following apparently some temperamental attraction,

moved to New Orleans.

[Illustration: Facsimile of an autograph poem by Lafcadio Hearn.]

As we look at the decade of his life there, the notable thing now

is the growth of his artistic, and still more of his intellectual,

power. At first his imagination was captured by the strange, tropical,

intoxicating beauty of the old Creole city, its social and ethnological

contrasts, its mysterious underworld, and barbaric cults. He felt it

to be his artistic duty, he writes, 'to be absorbed into this new life

and study its form and color and passion.' Yet little more than a year

later we find him in a mood of disillusion and of something resembling

remorse. He writes to Mr. H. E. Krehbiel:--

'I am very weary of New Orleans. The first delightful impression it

produced has vanished. The city of my dreams, bathed in the gold of

eternal summer, and perfumed with amorous odours of orange flowers, has

vanished like one of those phantom cities of South America swallowed

up centuries ago by earthquakes, but reappearing at long intervals to

delude travellers. What remains is something horrible, like the tombs

here,--material and moral rottenness which no pen can do justice to.

You must have read some of those mediæval legends in which the amorous

youth finds the beautiful witch he has embraced all through the night

crumble into a mass of calcined bones and ashes in the morning. Well,

I feel like such a one, and almost regret that, unlike the victims of

these diabolical illusions, I do not find my hair whitened and my lips

withered by sudden age; for I enjoy exuberant vitality and still seem

to myself like one buried alive or left alone in some city cursed with

desolation like that described by Sinbad the sailor. No literary circle

here; no jovial coterie of journalists; no associates save those

vampire ones of which the less said the better. And the thought--Where

must all this end?--may be laughed off in the daytime, but always

returns to haunt me like a ghost in the night.'

Later, his advantageous connection with the 'Times-Democrat,' and his

friendship with some of the most interesting and cultivated people of

the city, made him happier in his residence there. From 1881, the date

of the passage quoted, his preoccupation is more and more with books,

and the things of the intellect and imagination, with 'the life of

vanished cities and the pageantry of dead faiths,' less and less with

'vampire' associates. Yet still he purchases queer books, follows queer

subjects, and 'pledges himself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer,

the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous,' which, as he writes, 'suits my

temperament.'

The chief literary expression of this impulse in its early phase was

his 'Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures,' chiefly written before

1883, and published two years later. This, a series of reconstructions

of what impressed him as most fantastically beautiful in the most

exotic literature he was able to obtain, shows a remarkable growth in

mere craftsmanship over his translations from Gautier. The cadences are

surer, the weird or gorgeous pictures built up from simpler words, and

the exotic atmosphere is more enveloping and persuasive.

But the handful of arabesques that Hearn brought together in his

'Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures' was only a drop in the bucket

that came up brimming from that deep well of 'the Odd, the Queer, the

Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.' In the first five years of his

work for the 'Times-Democrat,' he made and printed in the paper no

fewer than two hundred translations of French stories and striking

chapters or passages from the French books that engaged his eager

attention. When we remember that the bulk of these versions were

from the writings of the greatest contemporary masters of French

prose,--thirty-one were from Maupassant,--we become aware of at least

one of the sources of that extraordinary growth in Hearn's mastery of

his instrument that can be seen when we compare the suave and luminous

current of the prose of 'Some Chinese Ghosts' in 1887, with the volume

from Gautier, or even with the 'Stray Leaves.'

It was at this time, too, that Hearn, forsaking translation for

original work, began to follow the leading of his imagination into

characteristic paths. The readers of the 'Times-Democrat,' largely, of

course, of French descent, gave him a sympathetic public for a type of

work that could perhaps have appeared in no other paper in America. He

printed, even apparently with a certain _réclame_, curious, condensed,

personalized paraphrases of out of the way books, like Perron's 'Femmes

Arabes,' and other curious investigations of the Exotic, and passed

easily from this into such excursions in aromatic impressionism as

those that record his vacation in Florida, colored by his reading of

Gaffarel's 'Floride Française,'[1] or his studies of the Creole life

and language.

It is this group of papers, of special interest and significance to

the student of Hearn,--themselves marked by the rich beginnings of his

characteristic charm,--that have been selected to form the bulk of the

present volume. Hearn himself at one time began to prepare for the

press a collection of these papers, with the Floridian Reveries' as its

initial section. Indeed, there is before me as I write a manuscript

title-page done with those queer, curiously curving strokes of the pen,

reading,--and bearing the striking motto from Delacroix that stands

at the beginning of the present volume. Apparently it was Hearn's

intention to add to the 'Floridian Reveries' a little collection

of 'Fantastics,' with such savory titles as 'Aida,' 'The Devil's

Carbuncle,' 'A Hemisphere in a Woman's Hair,' 'The Fool and Venus,' etc.

This group, however, is, unfortunately, lost. From the notebook labeled

upon its cover 'Fantastics' many leaves have been cut, and there

remains only the paper on 'Arabian Women,' which appears hereafter. The

Creole papers have been selected from the vast number of essays that

Hearn wrote upon this subject, as showing best, perhaps, the peculiar

direction of his interests. Taken as a whole, the material here offered

to the reader marks the end of Hearn's first literary period, the

period of translation and paraphrase, of 'literary journalism.'

The year 1883, as readers of his letters know, marked an epoch in

Hearn's intellectual life. Then for the first time he read Herbert

Spencer, and by a singular paradox conceived a passionate adoration

for that passionless philosopher who, we may think, had the peculiar

advantage of knowing so much about the Unknowable.' The secret of the

paradox seems to have been that Spencer's vast synthetic panorama of

the universe, outer and inner, was precisely the kind of vision to

attract Hearn's gypsy intellect, so long bewildered by the 'pageantry

of dead faiths,' so long obsessed by the incommunicable sorrow of the

world, yet pledged to the quest of 'the absolute' by the forces of his

Celtic and Hellenic ancestry. At any rate the philosophy of Spencer

came to him with something of the power and unction of an evangelical

religion, bringing with it not only conversion, but conviction

of sin,' and 'regeneration.' From this time on, there was a new

seriousness in his life and a new gravity in his work. Henceforth he

was concerned about the Exotic and Monstrous chiefly as they could be

employed as parables of the gospel according to Herbert Spencer.

A year or two later there came into his work another strain that was to

remain potent,--the tropical. As early as 1879 he had felt the spell,

and had written: 'So I draw my chair to the fire, light my pipe _de

terre_ Gambièse, and in the flickering glow weave fancies of palm trees

and ghostly reefs and tepid winds, and a Voice from the far tropics

calls to me across the darkness.'

In 1884 he made the visit to Grande Isle in the Mexican Gulf that

resulted in his 'Chita,' which is still in many respects his most

astonishing _tour de force_ in word-painting, though in it we see how

far away he was from the English tradition of creative art in fiction.

The only logic in the harrowing conclusion is the emotional logic of

a temperament immitigably macabresque, that must make a tale of terror

intensify in poignancy to the end.

In 1887, he went to the French West Indies, and found there a theme

perhaps more in consonance with the full richness of his vein than

any he afterwards encountered. In 'Youma,' his West Indian novelette,

the note is certainly falsetto, but in his 'Two Years in the French

West Indies' the luxuriant leafiness of his style, heavy with tropical

perfumes, subtly interpenetrated with the sense of tropical terror,

rarely goes beyond the bounds of faithful depiction. And underneath it

all we begin to see that impressive Spencerian perception of the fatal

unity of the world.

In June, 1888, Hearn landed in New York, but drunken as he was with

tropic light, he was troubled by the canyoned streets, and returned to

Martinique by the same boat that had brought him. In the following year

he was in Philadelphia, preparing his West Indian books for the press.

At this time he suddenly conceived a passionate and characteristic

interest in Japan from reading Mr. Percival Lowell's 'The Soul of

the Far East.' His correspondence is full of it. 'How luminous,' he

exclaims, 'how psychically electric!' It was with boundless delight and

with the highest hopes that he welcomed a suggestion that he should go

to Japan to prepare a series of articles upon that country.

As one who reads Hearn's writings chronologically passes from the West

Indian books to the Japanese, there is evident a remarkable change,

not only of atmosphere but of tone, and, despite the continuity of

the Spencerian preoccupation, of what we may perhaps call 'soul.' The

tropical luxuriance of his earlier manner has been replaced by quieter

tints and subtler cadences, and henceforth he gives free rein to his

faculty only in rare heightened passages, which rise above the narrow,

quiet stream of his habitual prose with an effect incomparably telling.

In part this was the result of his sensitive perception of the peculiar

color of Japanese landscape, a domesticated Nature, which loves man,

and makes itself beautiful in a quiet gray-and-blue way like the

Japanese women'; which must in consequence be reproduced in water-color

rather than in the oils in which he had been working. In part it was

the result of his greater maturity, and that assured control over his

medium, which left him no impulse to mere virtuosity. But still more,

one thinks as one reads the letters, it was the result of happier and

more normal conditions of life. As a professor of English literature,

he had something approaching a secure social and economic position. As

the friend of men like Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, and Paymaster

Mitchell McDonald, some of his oddities were neutralized. (He felt

always more of a man, he said, after contact with their reality,

'like Antæus, who got stronger every time his feet touched the solid

ground.') As the father of three boys and the head of a Japanese

household of eleven persons, he had for the first time a stake in the

world. And finally in what was clearly a marriage of almost miraculous

suitability for him, his restless spirit found a measure of peace.

[Footnote 1: It was a happy coincidence which, within a week of the

search in the Boston Public Library that revealed the literary sources

of these writings, brought me from Japan, the gift of Mrs. Hearn, this

very book from Hearn's own collection of works dealing with the Odd,

the Queer, etc.]

Lafcadio Hearn has been called a 'decadent'; the word does not signify,

but if by it is meant, as sometimes seems to be, a humanist without

physique, there is a considerable measure of truth in its application.

If one symptom of decadence be the love of words for their own sake,

it was, as we have seen, not lacking in his earlier work. There is,

however, nothing more unjust to most human beings then the application

to them of tags that have taken their color from trite literary usage

and hasty popular association with a few notorious characters. This is

especially true in Hearn's case. In 1885 he wrote to W. D. O'Connor:

'If my little scraggy hand tells you anything, you ought to recognize

in it a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous

disposition,--almost your antitype in everything except the love

of the beautiful.' The _advocatus diaboli_ himself could scarcely

have done better. Erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous,

Hearn undoubtedly was; and these qualities, enhanced as they were by

self-pity, so far from being what the psychologists call 'independent

variables,' were of the very essence of his faculty. 'Unless,' he

writes, 'somebody does or says something horribly mean to me I can't

do certain kinds of work'; and again: 'I have found that the possessor

of pure horse-health never seems to have an idea of the "half-lights."

It is impossible to see the psychical undercurrents of human existence

without that self-separation from the purely physical part of being

that severe sickness gives like a revelation.'

For all his fine Byronic swimming of straits and wide bays Hearn was

never the possessor of 'pure horse-health,' and it is pretty clear that

to his lack of it, to his trembling sense of the hard attrition of

the world, we owe his marvelous mastery of the 'half-light.' Yet this

was not so much 'morbidness' in our English sense, as _morbidezza_,

the quality of mellow-tinted color and soft harmonies. Late in life

he wrote, 'I like Kipling's morbidness, which is manly and full

of enormous resolve and defiance in the truth of God and Hell and

Nature,--but the other--no!' Of 'the other' there is little trace in

his own latest work.

The chief morbid factor in Hearn's physical constitution was his

vision. One eye was totally blind, the other had, it is said, but one

twentieth of normal vision; but too much has been made of this as a

qualification of his genius. His monocular vision gave him, of course,

landscape 'flat,' without perspective and depth; but undoubtedly, like

the half-closed eye of the painter, it gave him color in wonderful

harmonious intensity, and who shall say that it was with a vividness

beyond Nature? The tremendous cumulative rhapsody of blue at the

beginning of his 'Two Years in the French West Indies' is said by those

who best know the Southern seas not to exceed reality. And there is

plenty of evidence that in his quick, comprehending glances through

the single eyeglass that he habitually carried, he seized minute

significant details of persons or objects which others missed. It has

been said by one who should be qualified to know, that he saw his

world as partially and obscurely as one who looks through the large

end of an opera-glass; but the analogy is imperfect unless we remember

that objects so seen are given not only with remoteness, but with

rich color, and with a curious artistic composition like a Claude in

miniature.

But after all it was the lens in the brain that counted with Hearn. As

opposed to his vision, his visionary faculty was of the first order.

From boyhood, 'ghostly' was his characteristic, as it finally came to

be almost his trick word. He envisaged wraiths and vanished cities with

a definition more like that of objective than of subjective sight.

Only his skeptical intelligence kept him from being a thoroughgoing

spirit-seer. Perhaps his most characteristic mood was that reflected in

his impressive essay on 'Dust' in 'Gleanings from Buddha Fields'--'I

have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being

haunted,--haunted by the prodigious luminous spectre of the world.'

It is not necessary to go much further about to apprehend the inner

nature of Lafcadio Hearn. In the same 'Dust' there is a 'lyrical'

paragraph that conveys him very perfectly:--

'I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"--not! Rather it is a

fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever

occurred in South America; and the nominal government, supposed to be

rational, declares that an eternity of such anarchy is not desirable. I

have souls wanting to soar in air, and souls wanting to swim in water

(sea-water, I think), and souls wanting to live in woods or on mountain

tops.' And so on through a Homeric catalogue of his souls, till at the

end he breaks out, '_I_ an individual,--an individual soul! Nay, I am a

population,-a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a

thousand millions!'

Half-fantastic this passage may very well be, but none the less it is

the faithful reflection of a temperament lacking the sane integrity

of perfect health, a nature at odds with itself through many warring

inheritances and subtle rebellions of the blood, yet mastered at the

last in most of its human relations by a character essentially fine.

The final estimation of Hearn's work is impeded by its scattered bulk,

but when in the fullness of time it is finally brought together in

a collected edition it will be seen to stand very high in the second

class of English prose, the class of the great _prosateurs_, Sir Thomas

Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Walter Pater.

Had he lived longer his rank might have been higher still. He had

outgrown his old decadent conception of style as separable from

substance, as an end to be attained in itself, to be arrived at by

miners' work in dictionaries and thesauri. His work never ceased to be

conscious art, but in his very latest writing there is a perfect fusion

of his vigorous imaginative thought in the melancholy music of his

cadenced prose. Toward the end of his life he had dreams more ambitious

even than the stylistic ambitions of his youth so amply realized. In

1895 he wrote, 'I really think I have stored away in me somewhere

powers larger than any I have yet been able to use. Of course I don't

mean that I have any hidden wisdom or anything of that sort, but I

believe I have some power to reach the public emotionally if conditions

allow.' Still later the project is explicitly stated: 'a single short,

powerful philosophical story, of the most emotional and romantic sort.'

'I feel within me,' he writes, 'the sense of such a story--vaguely,

like the sense of a perfume or the smell of a spring wind which you

cannot define. But the chances are that a more powerful mind than mine

will catch the inspiration first, as the highest peak most quickly

takes the sun.'

Whether his imagination, with all its activity, had quite the creative,

shaping energy ever to fulfill this dream, we shall never know.

But it is certain at any rate that the last of his work, published

posthumously, shows both a broadening and a deepening of what, despite

the artifice of his method, we may justly call his inspiration. Had

he lived to complete the imaginative autobiography of which fragments

are printed in his 'Life and Letters,' it might have proved his

masterpiece. The fragments have a sincere and haunting poignancy, and

his prose was never more vivid and musical. For all that 'population'

within him, his own intellectual and imaginative life had been marked

by a unity that would doubtless have induced a corresponding unity in

the book, with striking artistic results.

The integrity of Hearn's intellectual life consisted in his strangely

single-hearted devotion to both artistic beauty and scientific truth.

And precisely in this, I believe, lies the significance of his work.

He was, in a certain sense, the most Lucretian of modern writers. It

has been said that, as Spinoza was 'a man drunk with God,' so Lucretius

was 'a man drunk with natural law.' Well, Hearn was a man drunk with

Herbert Spencer, and in all save the accident of form he was the

poet of Spencerian evolution. As Lucretius, preaching his tremendous

doctrine of the monstrous, eternal rain of atoms through the world,

wove into his great poem the beauty of the old mythology, the tragedy

of passionate humanity, so Hearn, in his gentler fashion, steadily

envisaged the horror that envelops the stupendous universe of modern

science, and by evoking and reviving ancient myths and immemorial

longings, cast over the darkness a ghostly light of vanished suns.

In the final paragraph of his 'Romance of the Milky Way,'--the River

Celestial along which, in Japanese mythology, the spirits of the dead

return to meet their loves beneath the moon,--we have the heart of

Lafcadio Hearn:--

'Perhaps the legend of Tanabata, as it was understood by those old

poets, can make but a faint appeal to Western minds. Nevertheless,

in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon,

the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the

scintillant sky,--to make me forget the monstrous facts of science,

and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky

Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are

powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanagowa itself,--the

River Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists

that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the

winds of autumn. White Orihim? I see at her starry loom, and the Ox

that grazes on the farther shore; and I know that the falling dew is

the spray from the Herdsman's oar. And the heaven seems very near and

warm and human; and the silence about me is filled with the dream of

a love unchanging, immortal,--forever yearning and forever young, and

forever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the gods.'

If, as some hold, the problem of modern romantic literary art has

been to portray the human spirit caught in a magic web of necessity,

'penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves'; to

marry strangeness with beauty; to accomplish all this in a style as

express and gleaming as goldsmith's work; then few writers have solved

it more brilliantly than Lafcadio Hearn.

EPHEMERÆ.

FLORIDIAN REVERIES

TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

_May_ 2, 188-

Across the Floridian barrens to the sea,-a long night and a longer

day of steam-travel over light powdery soil, the tint of hour-glass

sand, whose dust filters like a ruddy fog through the joints of the

double-windows and tightly-fitting doors of the sleeping-car; furious

travel through wildernesses of yellow pine, whose naked and mastlike

stems forever twinklingly intercross before one's tired eyes with the

rapidity of lightning. The smoke of the engine descends to mingle with

the low hanging cloud of ruddy dust; the sun, which rose in advance of

us, is now behind us, but there is yet no variation in the monotony of

the woods. Sometimes the train halts at a rustic station,--buildings of

painted pine relieved against the endless background of living trees;

the smoke floats off slowly through the heavy afternoon; the red dust

settles lazily; and one rushes to the platform to snatch a breath of

purer air, and to peer expectantly westward. Still nothing;--only

the colonnades of pine filing away eternally to right and left, and

the lurid road stretching endlessly backward and onward with its two

streaks of iron light converging toward either horizon,--and the voice

of a bird in some green hiding-place, breaking the hot stillness with

plaintive triple cry of 'Sweet!--sweet!--sweet!'--repeated over and

over again at drowsy intervals. Never a variation in the frondescence,

never a flower; the melancholy of the land has begun to weigh upon you

like a pain. Our city minds, our city eyes, accustomed to the relief

of contrast, are tormented by creations of such perpetual sameness, of

such enormous monotony, of such never-varying beauty as Nature devises

in her own solitudes. These shadowy infinitudes do not seem formed for

the gaze of the nineteenth century; their boundless uniformity rather

inspires dreams of those coniferous growths which burdened the land

in ages preceding the apparition of man,--when there were yet neither

blossoms nor perfumes, neither saccharine secretions nor succulent

fruits,--ere even the hum of honey-loving insects was heard, or the

beauty of butterflies had been formed, or the nations of the ants had

yet begun to toil,--and all the earth was green.

Then a scream of steam, a mighty jolt; and the thunder-rattle

recommences, and the train again begins to rock in mad storms of dust

and smoke, and the red sun ignites a stupendous conflagration behind

the pillars of the pines. At last, under the moon, there is another

shriek of steam; the wheels slacken, rumble jerkingly, then roll

slowly and silently, as if muffled, with occasional squeak, and pause

with a final shock; while through hastily opened windows and doors, a

strong cool air dashes in,--the breath of the great St. Johns River,

sweetened by mingling with the mightier breath of the sea, and bearing

with it scent of orange flowers and odors of magnolia.

And in the purple night, under the palpitation of stars, Jacksonville

opens all her electric eyes.

_May_ 4, 188-

Morning inundates the streets with its fluid gold; the trees drink

in the brightness; the plate-glass of store-fronts flames like

immense jewel-facets;--and what singular stores these are!--mostly

curiosity shops! Here are dealers in strange flowers, flowers formed

of iridescent fish-scales,--in jointed walking canes of shark's

vertebræ,--in tropical shells, bearing paintings of sabals and

cypresses upon their nacreous inner surface,--in splendid screens

made of the spoils of white herons and sea-eagles,--in sea-beans and

sea-porcupines and seaweed fans and polished shells of the sea-turtle,

--in alligator-eggs and stuffed alligators, and live alligators in

boxes,--in alligators' teeth, burnished and gold-mounted as brooches,

as cuff-buttons, as necklace ornaments, as earrings. Atavism in the

evolution of the lapidary's art,--an unconscious return of fashion

to the savage bijou try of fossil races! After perhaps not less than

half-a-million of years our boasted civilization finds æsthetic joy

in the art of the Tertiary Epoch; and in the bud-smooth lobule of her

dainty ear, the modern beauty does not hesitate to hang even such a

decoration as that worn many thousand centuries ago by some primitive

beauty,--tall daughters of mammoth-hunters and lion-slayers.

The breath of the sea quivers in the emerald of the trees, and,

sea-like, the broad St. Johns washes the feet of the white town. In

the shadow of the wharves the water is deeply green and glossy as the

surface of a magnolia leaf; further out it brightens and changes to

sky-color, and cools off into steel-tint near the opposite shore.

Violet bands moving over the immense breadth of the flood betray the

course of mysterious currents. A long promontory, piercing the miles

of unruffled water, mirrors the golden-greens, and sap-greens, and

sombre greens of its unbroken woods; but much further away, across the

enormous curve, the forest lines, steeped in the infinite bath of azure

light, turn blue. As through high gates of green, the eye looks up the

vast turn into a cerulean world; and it is through these rich portals

that you may sail into the region of legend and romance,--that you

may reach those subterranean rivers, those marvelous volcanic springs

haunted by dim traditions of the Fountain of Youth, and by the memory

of the good gray knight who sought its waters in vain.

And though the days of faith be dead, men look for that

Phantom-Fountain still. Yearly, from the gray cities of wintry lands

thousands hasten to the eternal summer of this perfumed place, to

find new life, new strength--to seek rejuvenescence in the balm

of the undying groves, in the purity of rock-born springs, in the

elixir-breath of this tropical Nature, herself eternally young with the

luminous youth of the gods. And multitudes pass away again to duller

lands, to darker skies, rejuvenated indeed,--the beauty with rose-bloom

brightened, the toiler with force renewed,--feeling they have left

behind them here something of their hearts, something of their souls,

caught like Spanish moss on the spiked leaves of the palms, on the

outstretched arms of the cedars.

Why River-worship should have held so large a place in the ancient

religions of the world, I thought I could more fully comprehend on

that aureate afternoon,--while our white steamer clove her way toward

a long succession of purple promontories that changed to green at

our approach, and the city was fading away behind us in smoke of

gold. Blue miles of water to right and left; the azure enormity

ever broadening and brightening before. Viewing the majesty of the

flood, the immortal beauty of the domed forests crowning its banks,

the day-magic of colors shifting and interblending through leagues

of light, a sense of inexpressible reverence fills the mind of the

observer,--a sense of the divinity of Nature, the holiness of beauty.

These are the visions we must call celestial; this is the loveliness

that is sacred, that is infinite,--the poetry of heaven. Through

the splendor of blue there seemed to float to my memory as sounds

float to the ear, some verses of an ancient Indian hymn, whereof the

authorship has been ascribed even to the Spirit of the Universe: '_I

am the sweetness of waters, the light of moon and sun, the perfume

of earth, the splendor of fire.... I am the Soul in all that

lives;--Time-without-end am I, and the life of things to be, the Spirit

celestial and supreme_, MOST ANCIENT AND MOST EXCELLENT OF POETS.'

The sun dropped through a lake of orange light, and there were lilac

tints in the sky, and ghostly greens. Then the great indigo darkness

came; stars sparkled out; the boat chanted her steam-song, slackened

her speed before a yellow glimmering of lamps, and halted at the

wharves of Palatka. Here we bade her farewell; too huge a craft she

was for the pilgrimage we wished to make to the mysterious fountain.

Slender and light the boat must be that makes the journey thither,--a

voyage upon stranger waters than these: no giant stream like the St.

Johns, but a dim river with an Indian name, a narrow river undulating

through the forest like some slow serpent unrolling its hundred coils

of green. And, as a greater serpent devours a lesser one, so the

writhing Ocklawaha swallows the shining current that flows from the

Silver Spring.

Seated that evening on a balcony that jutted out under the star-light,

above the crests of palmettos, I pondered upon the legend of the

Fountain. It was among the Bahamas that Juan Ponce de Leon first sought

for the waters of youth,--striving to discover some island vapory

and vague as Hesperus, and questioning curiously the Indians of the

Archipelago. Then it was he heard of the mainland where 'the wished-for

waters flowed as a river upon whose banks lived the rejuvenated races

in serene idleness and untold luxuriance.' Was this a rumor of the

spring with a silver name, whose waters indeed 'flow as a river'?--or

was it an Indian tale of some other one of those many and wondrous

Floridian sources whose unfathomed transparencies own the iridescent

magnificence of jewel-fire? Or might not the valiant Spaniard have

heard in his boyhood some Moorish story of that mystic fountain which

the Prophet Khader alone of all God's creatures was permitted to find?

And that Moslem tradition itself, had it not been brought to Islam by

Arabian travelers to the further East,--as a bud from the marvelous

garden of Hindoo myth,--a fairy-flower created by the poet-wizards of

India,--a blossom of parable, perchance, called into being by the lips

of Buddha? 'Not wholly thus,' deep scholars answer; 'for the legend of

Gautama is only a poem evolved from ancient myths of the Sun-god; and

the fable of the Fountain doubtless first sprang from the primitive

belief that the Day-star, whose glory waned with evening, nightly

renewed the strength of his splendor by bathing in the fountains of

Ocean,--in the enchanted waters of the West.' Perhaps, perhaps!--But

can we boldly aver that the beautiful myth is not more ancient

still,--old as love,--old as the mourning for the dead,--old as the

heart of man, and its dreams of the eternal, and its desires of the

impossible?

_May_ 5, 188-

From the deck of the slender Osceola, looking up the river, the eye

can seldom see more than a hundred yards of the Ocklawaha at one

time: so sudden and so multitudinous are the turns of the stream that

the boat seems ever steering straight for land,--continually moving

into fluvial recesses without an exit. But always as she seems about

to touch the bank, a wooded point detaches itself from the masses of

verdure,--a sharp curve betrays its secret,--a new vista terminating

in new mysteries of green, opens its gates to our prow. Narrow

and labyrinthine the river is, but so smooth that like a flood of

quicksilver it repeats inversely all the intricacies of tangle-growths,

all delicate details of leaf and blossom, all the bright variations

of foliage-color. And gradually one discerns a law of system in those

diversities of tint,--an ordination in the variety of tree-forms. Near

the water the swamp-growth is dwarfed, tufted, irregular, but generally

bright of hue; further back it rises to majestic maturity, offering a

long succession of domes and cupolas of frondescence, alternated with

fantastic minarets of cypress; behind all, the solid and savage forest

towers like a battlement, turret above turret, crown above crown,--oak

and ash, maple and pine. The dominant tone is the light green of the

pines and the gum trees, and the younger ranks of cypress; but the

elder cypress and the myrtles, and the younger ash, break through

with darker masses of color. Singularly luminous greens also shine

out at intervals in the wreathings of love-vines and in the bursts of

sweet-bay. But whether radiant or sombre, the color is seen as through

a gauze,--through the gray veil ubiquitously woven by the aerial moss

that fringes every crest, that drools from every twig, that droops in

myriad festoons, that streams in hoary cascades from every protruding

bough. And mistletoe mingles with the moss, and air-plants nestle

in the armpits of the cypresses, and orchids bloom on dead limbs;

while, from the morass below, extraordinary parasitic things, full of

snaky beauty, climb and twine and interwreathe, often to lose their

strangling hold at last, and fall back in spiral coils.

Then also, to right and left, broad bands of translucent green begin

to edge the river surface,--the nations of the water-lilies uprearing

their perfumed heads,--some whiter than moon-light, some yellower than

gold. All start and tremble at our passing, as though suddenly aroused

from slumber; and I long watch them nodding in our wake, more and more

drowsily, slowly settling down to dream again.

Rarely there comes a break in the solid leagues of forest-wall,--a

deep space filled with celestial color, a golden green, the green of

orange-groves,--making the wilder tints of nature turn spectral by

contrast. These indeed are the veritable Gardens of Hesperides, and

theirs the bright fruit of Greek legend,--those Apples of Gold the

Demigod sought in mythic islands of the Western Sea,--that Hippomenes,

hard-pressed in the race of love, cast before the flying feet of

Atalanta. For the orange hath its mythology.

Little frogs, metallically bright as the lily-leaves on which they

sit, chant in chorus; butterflies flutter on vermilion wing from

bank to bank; sometimes the nose of an alligator furrows the river.

The palmettos, heretofore rare, begin to multiply; they assemble in

troops, in ranks, in legions. And other gracious forms appear,--true

palms,--satin-skinned and wonderfully tall. They hold themselves aloof

from the cypresses and the oaks; they don no draperies of moss--proudly

majestic in the elegance of their naked beauty. They approach the

flood, yet shrink from it with feminine timidity; if the treacherous

soil yield beneath their feet, still, by some miracle of poise, they

save themselves from fall. Then wonderful indeed is the suppleness of

their curves; the neck of the ostrich, the body of the serpent, seem

less lithely beautiful. Theirs is never the admirable but inflexible

stature of the often to lose their strangling hold at last, and fall

back in spiral coils.