A Confession of St. Augustine

VOLUME CXXXIV DECEMBER, 1916, TO MAY, 1917
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

BY W. D. HOWELLS
HEN we drove from the station up into the town, in the March of our first sojourn, and saw the palmettoes all along the streets, among the dim live-oaks and the shining magnolias, our doubting hearts lifted, and we said: “Yes, yes, it is all true! This is St. Augustine as advertised: the air, the sky, the wooden architecture of the 1870’s and ’80’s, when St. Augustine flourished most, and the memory of that dear Constance Fenimore Woolson, who worshiped Florida past all Italy, was still sweet in our literature. Yes, it is all incredibly true!” Then, as we made our way to Mr. Hastings’s beautiful masterpieces, the hotels Ponce de Leon and Alcazar, and took refuge in the Neo-Andalusian of the simpler hostelry from the Belated American of those obsolescent cottages, we gathered our faith and courage more and more about us, and gave ourselves to that charm of the place which has not yet failed us.
The charm is very complex, as a true charm always is, but the place is very simple, as a place which has taken time to grow always is. It is especially so if the place, like St. Augustine, has had its period of waning as well as waxing, and has gently lapsed from its climax. The heydey of its prosperity was in the years between the 1870’s and ’80’s, when St. Augustine promised to be lastingly, as it was most fitly, the winter resort for the whole sneezing and coughing North. Then the Great Freeze blasted the oranges and hopes of all Upper Florida; then California flowered and fruited ahead; then the summer shores of Palm Beach and Miami took the primacy from California, and Florida was again the desire of our winter travel and sojourn, with a glory of motoring and dancing such as Florida never knew before, or can ever know, at St. Augustine. But the little city continued the metropolis of the mind and heart for such as did not care to shine with the luster of money; and those beautiful hotels remained without rivalry from the vast wooden caravansaries of the more tropical resorts, and still remain holding down their quarter of the local topography.