No longer in doubt, though still wondering, I followed the tracks.
For a half-mile or more, the path meandered through thick forest, here turning around some giant trunk, there diverging to the right or left, to avoid the impervious network of canes and llianas.
At length it began to slope upwards; and I perceived by the ascent that I was climbing a hill. The woods became more open as I advanced—here and there alternating with glades—the trees were of slender growth, and the foliage lighter and thinner. I was no longer among the heavy trunks of platanus and liquidambar. The leguminoseae were the prevailing trees; and many beautiful forms of inga, acacia, and mimosa, grew around. Myrtles, too, mingled their foliage with wild limes, their branches twined with flowering parasites, as the climbing combretum, with its long flame-like clusters, convolvuli, with large white blossoms, and the beautiful twin-leaved bauhinia.
It was a wild garden of flowers—a shrubbery of nature’s own planting. The eye, wandering through the vistas and glades, beheld almost every form of inflorescence. There were the trumpet-shaped bignonias—convolvuli in pendulous bells—syngenesists disposed in spreading umbels; and over them, closely set upon tall spikes, rose the showy blossoms of the bromelias—aloes and dasylyrium. Even from the tops of the highest trees hung gaudy catkins, wafted to and fro by the light breeze, mingling their sheen and their perfume with the floral epiphytes and parasites that clustered around the branches.
I could not help thinking that these flowers are gifted with life, and enjoy, during their short and transient existence, both pleasure and pain. The bright warm sun is their happiness, while the cold cloudy sky is the reflection of their misery.
As I rode onward, another reflection passed through my mind; it was caused by my perceiving that the atmosphere was charged with pleasant perfumes—literally loaded with fragrance. I perceived, moreover, that the same breeze carried upon its breath the sweet music of birds, whose notes sounded clear, soft, and harmonious.
What closet-slanderer hath asserted that the flowers of this fair land are devoid of fragrance—that its birds, though brightly plumed, are songless?
Ah, Monsieur Buffon! with all your eloquence, such presumptive assertion will one day strip you of half your fame. You could never have approached within two hundred paces of a Stanhopea, of the epidendrum odoratum, of the datura grandiflora, with its mantle of snow-white blossoms? You could never have passed near the pothos plant, the serbereae, and tabernamon taneae, the callas, eugenias, ocotas, and nictiginas?—you could never have ridden through a chapparal of acacias and mimosas—among orchids whose presence fills whole forests with fragrant aroma?
And more, Monsieur! you could never have listened to the incomparable melody of the mock-bird—the full, charming notes of the blue song-thrush—the sweet warbling voices of the silvias, finches, and tanagers, that not only adorn the American woods with their gorgeous colours, but make them vocal with never-ending song?
No, Monsieur! you could never have inhaled the perfume of these flowers, nor listed to the melody of these sweet songsters; and sad it was of you, and silly as sad, to have yielded to the prejudice of a slender spirit, and denied their existence. Both exist—the singing birds and the fragrant flowers—both exist, and thou art gone.