PASADENA.
"If there be an Elysium upon earth,
It is this, it is this."
For my own taste, I prefer Pasadena, the "Crown of the Valley"—nine miles from Los Angeles, but eight hundred feet higher and with much drier air, at the foot of the Sierra Madre range, in the beauteous San Gabriel Valley. Yes, Pasadena seems to me as near Eden as can be found by mortal man.
Columbus in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella said, "I believe that if I should pass under the equator in arriving at this higher region of which I speak, I should find there a milder temperature and a diversity in the stars and in the waters.... I am convinced that there is the Terrestrial Paradise."
Poor persecuted Columbus! I wish he could have once seen Pasadena, the very spot he dreamed of. Can I now write calmly, critically, judicially of what I see, enjoy, admire and wonder over? If I succeed it will be what no one else has done. I was here last year and gave my impressions then, which are only strengthened by a second visit, so that I will quote my own words, which read like the veriest gush, but are absolutely true, came straight from my heart, and, after all, didn't half tell the story.
I am fascinated and enthralled by your sun-kissed, rose-embowered, semi-tropical summer-land of Hellenic sky and hills of Hymettus, with its paradoxical antitheses: of flowers and flannels; strawberries and sealskin sacks; open fires with open windows; snow-capped mountains and orange blossoms; winter looking down upon summer—a topsy-turvy land, where you dig for your wood and climb for your coal; where water-pipes are laid above ground, with no fear of Jack Frost, and your principal rivers flow bottom side up and invisible most of the time; where the boys climb up hill on burros and slide down hills on wheels; where the trees are green all the year, and you go outdoors in December to get warm; where squirrels live in the ground with owls for chums, while rats build in the trees, and where water runs up hill; where anything unpleasant, from a seismic disturbance to mosquitoes in March, is "exceptional" and surprising. A land where there are no seasons, but where sunshine and shade are so distinctly marked that one can be easily half baked on one side and dangerously chilled on the other.
Then the Climate—spell it with a capital, and then try to think of an adjective worthy to precede it. Glorious! Delicious! Incomparable! Paradisaical!!! To a tenderfoot straight from New Hampshire, where we have nine months of winter and three of pretty cold weather, where we have absolutely but three months that are free from frost, this seems like enchanted ground.
A climate warm, with a constant refreshing coolness in its heart; cool, with a latent vivifying warmth forever peeping out of its coat-tail pocket.
June does not define it, nor September. It has no synonym, for there is nothing like it. I am glad that I have lived to see hedges of heliotrope, of geraniums and calla-lilies. I remember, in contrast, solitary calla plants that I have nursed with care all winter in hopes of one blossom for Easter. And I do not feel sure that I can ever tear myself away. I am reminded of good old Dr. Watts, who was invited by Lady Abney to pass a fortnight at her home, and remained for forty years.
Here we all unconsciously eat the lotus in some occult fashion, are straightway bewitched and held willing captives. I have looked up the lotus, about which so much is said or sung and so little definitely known, and find it is a prickly shrub of Africa, bearing a fruit of a sweet taste, and the early Greeks knew all about its power. Homer in the Odyssey says that whoever ate of the fruit wished never to depart nor again to see his native land. Many of Ulysses' sailors ate this fruit, and lost all desire for home.