Petals Plucked from Sunny ClimesBrooks, A. M. (Abbie M.)
History
Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes
Brooks, A. M. (Abbie M.)
Cuba -- Description and travel; Florida -- Description and travel; Florida -- History
We are now enjoying moonlight nights, about which so many have so much
rhapsodized. There is no doubt that the nocturnal appearance of the
heavens in this latitude contrasts with a Northern one in the same
manner that two paintings differ--the warmth, richness, and brilliancy
of the one being in opposition to the poverty and indistinctness of the
other. On account of the latitude, there is no twilight--the "fairy web
of day is never hung out"--but from blazing sunshine into darkness we
are at once precipitated--no witchery or poetry to be found between the
magic hours intervening.
Every season finds a large number of nice people at this place, who
require a change of climate, from the severity of cold, piercing winds,
to the blandness of an Indian summer. The care-worn come to rest,
writers to find inspiration; for here, fanned by the sea-breeze, does
not "light-winged fancy" travel at a swifter pace in the daylight? and
when night comes, lulled by the surf, we can listen to the "great sea
calling from its secret depths."
The inquiry is often made by those who have never visited here, How do
you kill time in that ancient city? To the historian, there is no spot
so well adapted to meditation on the past, where associations are
awakened with greater rapidity, when the Indians held undisputed sway,
only dreaming of plenty and the happy hunting-grounds beyond; but,
suddenly as the Montezuma monarch, their territory was wrested from them
by the Spaniards, whom these unlettered savages at first regarded as
children of the Great Spirit; but when the ensigns of authority were
unfurled, their country overran by myrmidons, and the power of their
cazique sneered at, then the illusion vanished--the truth dawning that
they were only sojourners whose presence did not add to the happiness of
the newly self-constituted sovereigns of their country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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