Although it is generally well known that the condition of woman in most Latin countries is one of comparative seclusion,--totally different from that existence of large freedom she enjoys in English or American communities, some romantic misconception prevails regarding her life in the Latin tropics. Fiction, painting, and poetry have combined to create a false ideal of that life,--to make the word 'creole' suggest many happy, dreamy, luminous things. Not altogether are the artists and romance-writers at fault, nevertheless: their purpose has been only to reflect something of nature's magic in the zones of eternal summer; and no art and no words could transcend the splendor that was their inspiration. He who has once seen tropic nature under a tropic sun has received a revelation: there will come to him, if he has a heart, with a new strange meaning,--also eternal and true,--the words of John,--voiced perpetually from the purple peaks, and the undying woods, and sapphire glory of sea and sky:--'_This is the message which we announce unto you, that God is_ LIGHT!' Light!--no one dwelling in the cities of the North may ever imagine the possibilities of light and of color in the equatorial world. And he who has once known them must continue forever enchanted,--must feel, after departure from them, like an exile from Paradise. The poetry of the tropics is born of such regret. Romance and song are essentially imaginative; and that which surpasses and satiates imagination does not directly stimulate their production: it is only as an exile that the creole becomes a poet, when he remembers the charm of his country without the pains of its daily life. There is no more touching incident, perhaps, in literary history, than the fate of Léonard, the poet of Guadeloupe. His youth had been mostly spent abroad in struggles to obtain the means of returning to his native island. Succeeding after intense strain, he returned to find himself only a victim of the revolution of 1789,--threatened with death if he persisted in remaining. His friends hurried him on board a vessel; but, although he had been already wounded and pursued by an assassin, he could not nerve himself to go. Again and again he left the ship, and only with the greatest difficulty could he be persuaded at last to remain on board. But nostalgia had brought him to the condition of a dying man before his arrival in France. At Nantes he tried to reëmbark, hoping at least to die in his beloved island; but he expired before the ship could sail.