Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/294

Rh illustrations had been quite different. The same truth had ridden forth in like queenly sort, but in another chariot. Here it seems to me to be always midsummer, the weather is so genial by day and night. How clear the skies are! how brilliant the sun! It does not seem to go down and set, but rather to fall down and disappear, so suddenly, in this low latitude, does darkness take the place of. day. But what a night it is; how quick the nobler stars come out; how large they look! The sun is scarcely out of sight, and not only the planets—Jupiter and Mars—appear, but the larger fixed stars, as Sirius and Arcturus, with handsome attendance, have kindled a new day; then all the lesser sons of heaven, the "common people of the skies," rush into the field with democratic swiftness, and yet without indecorous haste. The Great Bear seems like a constellation of twinkling moons. Here, too, are stars I never saw before : on the Southern Cross beauty is for ever "lifted up" for the benediction of the world, and thereby the Father draws the eyes of even savage men and foplings of the street. When the new moon is only a day old, it is plain she carries the old one in her arms. Now she has not been gibbous quite two days, but yet the printer could read this letter by her light, walking in brightness such as northern eyes behold not. Even now the clouds are coloured as by day, only with less brilliant hues, yet quite equal to the day-clouds of a New England winter.

The vegetation astonishes a northern lover of nature; all is so strange. Save the rose, here is not a tree, not a shrub, an herb, nor a weed which I have ever seen growing naturally before. The flora is a conservatory turned out of doors. Our oaks and elms are replaced by tamarinds, cocoa-nuts, mahoganies, and mountain-palms; our apple and pear trees by the sappodilla, the banana, the orange, and the breadfruit; our sweet-scented locust has many a thorny cousin here, but all strangers to me. While the minister, in his surplice, is reading the Episcopal litany, the oleanders, tall as the eaves of his meeting-house, not admitted to the church, solicited by the wind, bend down and reach in through the window — which needs no glass to hedge the flock from cold — and interrupt the artificial service with their natural Lesson of Beauty, not only for