VIII.
AND ever through tepid nights and azure days the Guadeloupe
rushes on,—her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent
of fire beneath the stars,—steaming straight for the North.
Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,—beautiful
Montserrat, all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet
fallen from the waist!—breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth
town behind its screen of palms … young palms, slender and full
of grace as creole children are;—
And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling
through ocean-haze;—by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;—past
ghostly St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold,
like some dream of the Saint's own Second Summer;—
Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,—shark-haunted, bounded
about by huddling of little hills, blue and green.
Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"—all radiant
with verdure though well nigh woodless,—nakedly beautiful in
the tropic light as a perfect statue;—
Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the
left, and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,—old St.
Thomas, watching the going and the coming of the commerce that
long since abandoned her port,—watching the ships once humbly
solicitous for patronage now turning away to the Spanish rival,
like ingrates forsaking a ruined patrician;—
And the vapory Vision of, St. John;—and the grey ghost of
Tortola,—and further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the
aureate phantom of Virgin Gorda.
