I relapsed into the life and manners of these primitive countries; if not strictly virtuous, they are, at all events, terribly attractive. Existence in a tropical wilderness, in the midst of a voluptuous and half-civilized race, bears no resemblance to that of a London cockney, a Parisian lounger, or an American Quaker. Times there were, indeed, when a voice was heard within me that spoke of nobler aims. It reminded me of what I once was, of what I yet might be, and commanded imperatively a return to a healthier and more active life. But I had allowed myself to be enervated by this baneful languor, this insidious _far niente_, and my moral torpor was such that the mere thought of reappearing before a polished audience struck me as superlatively absurd. "Where was the object?" I would ask myself. Moreover, it was too late; and I went on dreaming with open eyes, careering on horseback through the savannas, listening at break of day to the prattle of the parrots in the guava-trees, at nightfall to the chirp of the _grillos_ in the cane-fields, or else smoking my cigar, taking my coffee, rocking myself in a hammock,--in short, enjoying all the delights that are the very heart-blood of a _guajiro_, and out of the sphere of which he can see but death, or, what is worse to him, the feverish agitation of our Northern society. Go and talk of the funds, of the landed interest, of stock-jobbing to this Sybarite, lord of the wilderness, who can live all the year round on luscious bananas and delicious cocoa-nuts, which he is not even at the trouble of planting,--who has the best tobacco in the world to smoke,--who replaces to-day the horse he had yesterday by a better one chosen from the first _caballada_ he meets,--who requires no further protection from the cold, than a pair of linen trousers, in that favored clime where the seasons roll on in one perennial summer,--who, more than all this, finds at eve, under the rustling palm-trees, pensive beauties eager to reward with their smiles the one who murmurs in their ears those three words, ever new, ever beautiful, "_Yo te quiero_." Moralists, I am aware, condemn this life of inaction and mere pleasure; and they are right. But poetry is often in antagonism with virtuous purposes; and now that I am shivering under the icy wind and dull sky of the North,--that I must needs listen to discussions on Erie, Prairie du Chien, Harlem, and Cumberland,--that I read in the papers the lists of the killed and wounded,--that havoc and conflagration, violence and murder, are perpetrated all around me,--I find myself excusing the half-civilized inhabitant of the savanna, who prefers his poetical barbarism to our barbarous progress.