Saturday, March 11th.
HIS morning we drove, or more properly rode, for no one drives in a volante, to the sea-shore. Although the sun was burning down upon us with his customary ardor, a “norther” cooled his ferver so effectually as to make a thick shawl necessary. Thicker boots were indispensable to save the feet from the sharp points of coral rocks over which we must walk, upon leaving the volante. With the assistance of our “norther,” a high tide dashed the waves in furious beauty over the low, unresisting shore, and with a muffled thunder straight out of the heart of infinity. I wonder if any familiarity can ever breed a feeling of even acquaintanceship with this “roar of torn ocean.” Was it not a pretty scene for us as we stood there,—the graceful, yet frowning Morro, with its white wave-washed feet, growing from the promontory across the bay, its fluttering flags foretelling ships like a presentiment, its towers warming and brightening in the parting smiles of the sun, with a very human pathos of joy! Far out on the restless sea, more restless ships toss and tack and veer their sails; clouds, dream thin, and sunset-souled. How blue they make the sea! How white the dark waves are painting them!
Behind us in the west rises a rough, high bluff, flanked by endless lines of barracks; on the outer wall, a solitary sentinel paces and watches us; under its shadow stands our waiting volante and the sunburnt callisero. Nothing more is visible except the sky-questioning palms behind the bluff—far in the south the strange city of this strange clime. Nothing anywhere is familiar save the quiet, tender sky above; and that is so blue, so intense, so twice a sky, so profound in its passion of beauty, that you wonder how sorrow and death can live beneath it!
I do not marvel that the people of sun-lands do not greatly aspire, or labor, or achieve. What need of this threefold weariness, this getting of spiritual bread by spiritual brain-sweat, when happiness falls down upon their heads all day long out of the sky; when feeling, which is a thousand times better than thought, buds and blossoms out of every sunbeam, and night is but a sudden sigh, a languishing wink of this regal lover between caresses.
Evening.—And the most interesting we have spent in Havana.
To describe a boat-ride upon the phosphorescent waters of this bay, one should, alas! have some powers of description. I can only outline it in a homely way and leave the rest to your imagination.
All our previous nights have been without twilight. The only apparent change was in the color, not the quality, of light; the warm gold, blanching into a colder, purer blaze, fitting the mind and eye for its enjoyment: it is the quantity not the intensity of daylight. But to-night the sun dies under the western sea, and an azure which is neither light nor darkness, fills the void. The stars discover through it their happy images below, and our throbbing oars—oars no longer, but living light—rival the pulsations of the stars.
All this time our “trackless way” is distinctly blazing far behind, while far below our cutting keel leaves its cicatrice; an antipodean milky-way, and our prow, like a Yankee boreas, carries its snowcloud in its teeth. There flies a fish with planetary speed, invisible in air, but in its native element a mistress “at home.” Even the oscillation of our little boat causes flashes of softest light in the surrounding air, by which our faces are brightened to reveal the beautiful peace and pleasure each feels.
We lean and look in the water at our side, and see the myriad scintillations that come and go with ever-changing variety, and then think, that to each spark is attached an organized body, with circulating medium and force, with sensations more or less acute; and that in this bay of some three square miles, is a galaxy of worlds; every globule a world of itself, inhabited by perfect and sentient beings, each with its hopes, fears, and perhaps its loves and hates, and therefore sorrows; and then we remember that the whole tropical waters which girdle the globe are equally crowded with life.