May 4, 188-
Morning inundates the streets with its fluid gold; the trees drink in the brightness; the plate-glass of store-fronts flames like immense jewel-facets;—and what singular stores these are!—mostly curiosity shops! Here are dealers in strange flowers, flowers formed of iridescent fish-scales,—in jointed walking canes of shark's vertebræ,—in tropical shells, bearing paintings of sabals and cypresses upon their nacreous inner surface,—in splendid screens made of the spoils of white herons and sea-eagles,—in sea-beans and sea-porcupines and seaweed fans and polished shells of the sea-turtle, —in alligator-eggs and stuffed alligators, and live alligators in boxes,—in alligators' teeth, burnished and gold-mounted as brooches, as cuff-buttons, as necklace ornaments, as earrings. Atavism in the evolution of the lapidary's art,—an unconscious return of fashion to the savage bijou try of fossil races! After perhaps not less than half-a-million of years our boasted civilization finds æsthetic joy in the art of the Tertiary Epoch; and in the bud-smooth lobule of her dainty ear, the modern beauty does not hesitate to hang even such a decoration as that worn many thousand centuries ago by some primitive beauty,—tall daughters of mammoth-hunters and lion-slayers.
The breath of the sea quivers in the emerald of the trees, and, sea-like, the broad St. Johns washes the feet of the white town. In the shadow of the wharves the water is deeply green and glossy as the surface of a magnolia leaf; further out it brightens and changes to sky-color, and cools off into steel-tint near the opposite shore. Violet bands moving over the immense breadth of the flood betray the course of mysterious currents. A long promontory, piercing the miles of unruffled water, mirrors the golden-greens, and sap-greens, and sombre greens of its unbroken woods; but much further away, across the enormous curve, the forest lines, steeped in the infinite bath of azure light, turn blue. As through high gates of green, the eye looks up the vast turn into a cerulean world; and it is through these rich portals that you may sail into the region of legend and romance,—that you may reach those subterranean rivers, those marvelous volcanic springs haunted by dim traditions of the Fountain of Youth, and by the memory of the good gray knight who sought its waters in vain.
And though the days of faith be dead, men look for that Phantom-Fountain still. Yearly, from the gray cities of wintry lands thousands hasten to the eternal summer of this perfumed place, to find new life, new strength—to seek rejuvenescence in the balm of the undying groves, in the purity of rock-born springs, in the elixir-breath of this tropical Nature, herself eternally young with the luminous youth of the gods. And multitudes pass away again to duller lands, to darker skies, rejuvenated indeed,—the beauty with rose-bloom brightened, the toiler with force renewed,—feeling they have left behind them here something of their hearts, something of their souls, caught like Spanish moss on the spiked leaves of the palms, on the outstretched arms of the cedars.
Why River-worship should have held so large a place in the ancient religions of the world, I thought I could more fully comprehend on that aureate afternoon,—while our white steamer clove her way toward a long succession of purple promontories that changed to green at our approach, and the city was fading away behind us in smoke of gold. Blue miles of water to right and left; the azure enormity ever broadening and brightening before. Viewing the majesty of the flood, the immortal beauty of the domed forests crowning its banks, the day-magic of colors shifting and interblending through leagues of light, a sense of inexpressible reverence fills the mind of the observer,—a sense of the divinity of Nature, the holiness of beauty. These are the visions we must call celestial; this is the loveliness that is sacred, that is infinite,—the poetry of heaven. Through the splendor of blue there seemed to float to my memory as sounds float to the ear, some verses of an ancient Indian hymn, whereof the authorship has been ascribed even to the Spirit of the Universe: 'I am the sweetness of waters, the light of moon and sun, the perfume of earth, the splendor of fire.... I am the Soul in all that lives;—Time-without-end am I, and the life of things to be, the Spirit celestial and supreme, MOST ANCIENT AND MOST EXCELLENT OF POETS.'
The sun dropped through a lake of orange light, and there were lilac tints in the sky, and ghostly greens. Then the great indigo darkness came; stars sparkled out; the boat chanted her steam-song, slackened her speed before a yellow glimmering of lamps, and halted at the wharves of Palatka. Here we bade her farewell; too huge a craft she was for the pilgrimage we wished to make to the mysterious fountain. Slender and light the boat must be that makes the journey thither,—a voyage upon stranger waters than these: no giant stream like the St. Johns, but a dim river with an Indian name, a narrow river undulating through the forest like some slow serpent unrolling its hundred coils of green. And, as a greater serpent devours a lesser one, so the writhing Ocklawaha swallows the shining current that flows from the Silver Spring.
Seated that evening on a balcony that jutted out under the star-light, above the crests of palmettos, I pondered upon the legend of the Fountain. It was among the Bahamas that Juan Ponce de Leon first sought for the waters of youth,—striving to discover some island vapory and vague as Hesperus, and questioning curiously the Indians of the Archipelago. Then it was he heard of the mainland where 'the wished-for waters flowed as a river upon whose banks lived the rejuvenated races in serene idleness and untold luxuriance.' Was this a rumor of the spring with a silver name, whose waters indeed 'flow as a river'?—or was it an Indian tale of some other one of those many and wondrous Floridian sources whose unfathomed transparencies own the iridescent magnificence of jewel-fire? Or might not the valiant Spaniard have heard in his boyhood some Moorish story of that mystic fountain which the Prophet Khader alone of all God's creatures was permitted to find? And that Moslem tradition itself, had it not been brought to Islam by Arabian travelers to the further East,—as a bud from the marvelous garden of Hindoo myth,—a fairy-flower created by the poet-wizards of India,—a blossom of parable, perchance, called into being by the lips of Buddha? 'Not wholly thus,' deep scholars answer; 'for the legend of Gautama is only a poem evolved from ancient myths of the Sun-god; and the fable of the Fountain doubtless first sprang from the primitive belief that the Day-star, whose glory waned with evening, nightly renewed the strength of his splendor by bathing in the fountains of Ocean,—in the enchanted waters of the West.' Perhaps, perhaps!—But can we boldly aver that the beautiful myth is not more ancient still,—old as love,—old as the mourning for the dead,—old as the heart of man, and its dreams of the eternal, and its desires of the impossible?
May 5, 188-
From the deck of the slender Osceola, looking up the river, the eye can seldom see more than a hundred yards of the Ocklawaha at one time: so sudden and so multitudinous are the turns of the stream that the boat seems ever steering straight for land,—continually moving into fluvial recesses without an exit. But always as she seems about to touch the bank, a wooded point detaches itself from the masses of verdure,—a sharp curve betrays its secret,—a new vista terminating in new mysteries of green, opens its gates to our prow. Narrow and labyrinthine the river is, but so smooth that like a flood of quicksilver it repeats inversely all the intricacies of tangle-growths, all delicate details of leaf and blossom, all the bright variations of foliage-color. And gradually one discerns a law of system in those diversities of tint,—an ordination in the variety of tree-forms. Near the water the swamp-growth is dwarfed, tufted, irregular, but generally bright of hue; further back it rises to majestic maturity, offering a long succession of domes and cupolas of frondescence, alternated with fantastic minarets of cypress; behind all, the solid and savage forest towers like a battlement, turret above turret, crown above crown,—oak and ash, maple and pine. The dominant tone is the light green of the pines and the gum trees, and the younger ranks of cypress; but the elder cypress and the myrtles, and the younger ash, break through with darker masses of color. Singularly luminous greens also shine out at intervals in the wreathings of love-vines and in the bursts of sweet-bay. But whether radiant or sombre, the color is seen as through a gauze,—through the gray veil ubiquitously woven by the aerial moss that fringes every crest, that drools from every twig, that droops in myriad festoons, that streams in hoary cascades from every protruding bough. And mistletoe mingles with the moss, and air-plants nestle in the armpits of the cypresses, and orchids bloom on dead limbs; while, from the morass below, extraordinary parasitic things, full of snaky beauty, climb and twine and interwreathe, often to lose their strangling hold at last, and fall back in spiral coils.
Then also, to right and left, broad bands of translucent green begin to edge the river surface,—the nations of the water-lilies uprearing their perfumed heads,—some whiter than moon-light, some yellower than gold. All start and tremble at our passing, as though suddenly aroused from slumber; and I long watch them nodding in our wake, more and more drowsily, slowly settling down to dream again.