Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/295

282 that day, bat for all days of the human year. Huge "silk-cotton trees," and "Guinea tamarinds/' mainly leafless now, diversify the landscape with their queer and fantastic look. The hills are mantled with sugar-cane, whose joints contain a sovereign juice, the island's wealth,—where power and sweetness float together for human good or ill; all the estates run with vegetable honey now, as the wind-mills crush the wealthy crop. The "pride of Barbadoes" opens its gorgeous bloom at the top of all the hedges; the false ipecacuanha—a ghastly beauty not less than a ghastly cure—grows by the road-side, with a certain lurid, poisonous look, as have many of her asclepian kindred. There is beauty all around, at least gorgeousness. Even the fish are many-coloured, and look like flowers of the sea, so brilliant and so various are their hues.

You are amazed at the wealth of life in these tropic lands. The ground, the air, the water, are all animated; a dead fruit is quickly transfigured to new life, so soon do insects translate the decaying elements to a higher form of existence. But after all it seems to me that nature here is not so nearly related to man as at home; vegetation has an unkindly look; you suspect these meretricious flowers, and keep aloof from the acacias and cactuses, and would have an honest homely apple-tree rather than all the prickly pears in all these islands which Columbus named after the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne. Perhaps this may be prejudice and narrow-mindedness on my part—I only tell what appears. In our cold northern lands we get tired of the winter; a longing for spring affects our literature, and has its influence on the character of all northern civilization. Here it is perpetual summer, and nobody longs for what all enjoy. The absence of grass is not pleasing to one who lives where it comes "creeping, creeping, creeping everywhere." Who would like to be buried under ugly sedges, their solid stems growing a foot apart and six feet high, and never wet with dew ? Grass-clad earth "unto our flesh is kind," and the sods of a New England valley will one day be sweet to us all.

But here as elsewhere the Lesson of Beauty is continual, and the same which is offered in New England. Large-