I am growing eager to see that “Venture on the Sea of Literature.” Have I told you I like the title amazingly? I shall be astonished and disgusted if it is not a happy hit. It shall be! Those—
Your friend,
L. G. C.
Paris, February 10, 1883.
CUBA.
ES, I went to Cuba, and it was a ravishing experience. Not quite an Eden, but so near to being! There was not an American (i. e., a Yankee) of us all who did not fully believe it would be, once “Uncle Sam” held it in his sturdy grip. To the last man and woman and the best, we defiantly broke the commandment and coveted our neighbor’s possession with our whole hearts. It is the most unreal reality, the most dream-like substantiality, the most vision-like, sure-enough scrap of earth imaginable. I feared to shut my eyes, lest on opening them it would have vanished. It looked as magical an isle as that. Oh—h! Just writing about it makes me catch my breath and widen my eyes to get it all back again.
The unspeakable splendors of its tropical vegetation—not only avenues and groves of “lofty palm trees,” but vast forests of them; not only “lofty palm trees,” but countless others, gorgeous in a burst of bloom without foliage—not a suspicion of green mingled with that blaze of richest rose, scarlet, purple or white, as it happened to be; not trees only, but clambering vines, all aflower with such lily bells as made me rub my eyes to make sure there was no illusion; and oh! such vistas and vistas of “the wonders of creation” as made me marvel what surpassing them could be possible in any other sphere!
I wish you could have seen the sunrise as we steamed into the harbor of Havana, the city itself seeming to rise out of the water like “beautiful Venice,” and like it, fashioned by the cunningest conjury out of sunbeams, the colors of the rainbow, the ethereal elements of the blue empyrean, the crystalline layers of the atmosphere, the tints of time and the films of earth! Yes, and have stood, as I stood later, on the ramparts of the fort, taking in such a spectacle of “the kingdoms of this earth” as swept me into thinking it almost equaled that of the Great Temptation on the Mount!