Saturday, March 11th.

THIS morning we drove, or more properly rode, for no one drives in a volante, to the sea-shore. Although the sun was burning down upon us with his customary ardor, a “norther” cooled his ferver so effectually as to make a thick shawl necessary. Thicker boots were indispensable to save the feet from the sharp points of coral rocks over which we must walk, upon leaving the volante. With the assistance of our “norther,” a high tide dashed the waves in furious beauty over the low, unresisting shore, and with a muffled thunder straight out of the heart of infinity. I wonder if any familiarity can ever breed a feeling of even acquaintanceship with this “roar of torn ocean.” Was it not a pretty scene for us as we stood there,—the graceful, yet frowning Morro, with its white wave-washed feet, growing from the promontory across the bay, its fluttering flags foretelling ships like a presentiment, its towers warming and brightening in the parting smiles of the sun, with a very human pathos of joy! Far out on the restless sea, more restless ships toss and tack and veer their sails; clouds, dream thin, and sunset-souled. How blue they make the sea! How white the dark waves are painting them!

Behind us in the west rises a rough, high bluff, flanked by endless lines of barracks; on the outer wall, a solitary sentinel paces and watches us; under its shadow stands our waiting volante and the sunburnt callisero. Nothing more is visible except the sky-questioning palms behind the bluff—far in the south the strange city of this strange clime. Nothing anywhere is familiar save the quiet, tender sky above; and that is so blue, so intense, so twice a sky, so profound in its passion of beauty, that you wonder how sorrow and death can live beneath it!

I do not marvel that the people of sun-lands do not greatly aspire, or labor, or achieve. What need of this threefold weariness, this getting of spiritual bread by spiritual brain-sweat, when happiness falls down upon their heads all day long out of the sky; when feeling, which is a thousand times better than thought, buds and blossoms out of every sunbeam, and night is but a sudden sigh, a languishing wink of this regal lover between caresses.

Evening.—And the most interesting we have spent in Havana.

To describe a boat-ride upon the phosphorescent waters of this bay, one should, alas! have some powers of description. I can only outline it in a homely way and leave the rest to your imagination.

All our previous nights have been without twilight. The only apparent change was in the color, not the quality, of light; the warm gold, blanching into a colder, purer blaze, fitting the mind and eye for its enjoyment: it is the quantity not the intensity of daylight. But to-night the sun dies under the western sea, and an azure which is neither light nor darkness, fills the void. The stars discover through it their happy images below, and our throbbing oars—oars no longer, but living light—rival the pulsations of the stars.

All this time our “trackless way” is distinctly blazing far behind, while far below our cutting keel leaves its cicatrice; an antipodean milky-way, and our prow, like a Yankee boreas, carries its snowcloud in its teeth. There flies a fish with planetary speed, invisible in air, but in its native element a mistress “at home.” Even the oscillation of our little boat causes flashes of softest light in the surrounding air, by which our faces are brightened to reveal the beautiful peace and pleasure each feels.

We lean and look in the water at our side, and see the myriad scintillations that come and go with ever-changing variety, and then think, that to each spark is attached an organized body, with circulating medium and force, with sensations more or less acute; and that in this bay of some three square miles, is a galaxy of worlds; every globule a world of itself, inhabited by perfect and sentient beings, each with its hopes, fears, and perhaps its loves and hates, and therefore sorrows; and then we remember that the whole tropical waters which girdle the globe are equally crowded with life.

Saturday, 11th.—The rejoicings profess to have reached a patriotic climax,—a grand display of all the troops on the island, which is twice the number of the whole military force of the United States. With the only vacant seat in our English carriage filled at last by our venerable friend Mr. N——, we drove out to the Campo del Marte. We found it difficult and delightful, steering our way through the archipelago of carriages and volantes filled with ladies in full ball costume, many of the faces and figures striking, a few very handsome; so that with well-rewarded patience and time, we obtained a good position.

The poverty of republican eyes is imbibantly observant of all appurtenances of royalty. First dashes past the knighted Governor-General, doffing cap and plume, and bowing with great dignity to the bowing multitude. Following are body-guard and staff, counts, marquises, and other nobility in uniform, crosses and decorations of honor.

The gentlemen informed me that the troops marched well. I am sure the regiments of negroes thought so, and enjoyed the supposition. We returned home to whist and delightful conversation on all things new and old, followed by the most cordial imaginable of good-nights and hand-shakings.

Sunday.—Early this morning to a Jesuit mass—low mass, and so very low that it could not be heard at all. Two priests only officiated, both meek-faced, keeping “custody of eyes;” one of them with the most remarkable intellectual and characteristic head I ever saw, the other with the devoutest, purest face. All the devotees, mostly women and girls, and liveried servants, knelt upon mats placed over the marble floor. All the ladies were gracefully arrayed in black lace Spanish veils, which, like moonlight on the Coliseum, “leaves that beautiful which still was so, and makes that which was not.” They were repeating their prayers; those who could read, from books, those who could not, from memory; and all the time the young and pretty ones were rolling their dark fascinating eyes around upon my escort of gentlemen, except when the moment came for crossing themselves and looking devoutly towards an image of the Virgin execrably done in wax.

I find the only way to extract good instead of disgust from scenes like this, is to ignore the wax and the tawdry ornaments, and to remember only the divinely sweet woman who loved Christ as I fear none of us have loved him; who suffered for him as none of us shall be honored by suffering for him; the only woman who united to the virgin’s charm the mother’s hallowing rapture; the woman whom God loved more than all earthly women, making her the mother of his son. You must think of the sanctity she has given to all motherhood. You must remember the elevation and delicacy she has given to the love of many pure and wise priests, who through the dark centuries loved no woman but her; who centred in her the love that might not be human nor for the human. Think of all this, and then see if you can wonder that the devout imaginations of the learned as well as of the ignorant Romanist have found a female element in the Trinity, and in worshipping the Father and Son have also most tenderly adored her who was a link between them; her through whom God is no longer an avenging God, and through whom Christ longs and makes ready for us.

The church, to my great surprise, though belonging to the Jesuits, displays no wealth and no taste; forlornly ugly pictures, clumsy tawdry flowers, and atrocious statues everywhere. Many things, however, were interesting enough to repay us for the trouble of getting up so early and walking so far.

Nothing could surpass the extremely graceful attitude of the ladies, or the universal beauty of the children, especially of the boys. How exquisitely regular and clear cut are their features! how transparent their large, soft, black eyes! how intelligent their whole expression! I am told that all Spanish boys and girls are remarkably precocious. At thirteen they promise to be geniuses, sing, paint, even write poetry that would not only startle a Northern mother, but frighten her with a certainty of the imminent dissolution of her cherub. After that age the tropical child remains savingly in statu quo, if he does not perceptibly degenerate.

Having still twenty minutes before breakfast, we drove quickly to the fashionable church of San Filipo. Found it having more pretension than the Jesuit (“Belen”) church, but not more taste. Abundance of tinsel, plenty of yellowed grotesque, semi-arabesque carvings on tinselled columns and what-not, but no beauty, unless, perchance, under the happy veil of some worshipping angel.

Sunday evening.—Is it a question of piety, or of taste, that so many places have holy names? “Jesus dil monto” “Jesus Maria,” “Las dace Apostles;” the latter being a battery of guns under the Morro, intended to convert enemies’ ships into enemies’ wrecks—a highly apostolic mode of conversion.

To end our Sabbath we ascended the Mount of Jesus and walked in a garden of cocoa-trees supposed to occupy relatively the position of Gethsemane.

Really the straight, tall lines of boles with their parachute tops, in a rapidly diminishing light, do produce a very novel impression—half rural, half architectural. One may fancy aisles and naves, transepts and choirs; the roofs, however, are real, made of leaves fourteen feet long, drooping like the mitres of a groin, and gothicizing a roof through which a few slender green rays penetrate—enough to reveal form without detail. But no marble gives sound to our footsteps; grass, poor a cow would say, but grass, for a carpet, and old cocoa-nuts to stumble over, bring us down to earth again. Here we are rewarded by some pretty flowers, which are the only beauties in this land of beauty who can wander “in maiden’s meditation, fancy free.” It is an effort to mount the Pisgah before us, but we must on to the very top, for our ankles are goaded by living spurs that lie lurking in the grass.

But we are spaciously rewarded, for there lies Havana in its whole extent before us; the level line of sea behind it; the Morro guarding it; the Principe fort threatening it; the bay reflecting it and the setting sun gilding it; palms on every hand outline their greens against the intensely azure sky behind, and white walls glance out of the luxuriant foliage, proud that humanity has a home within them. Low-like mounds fill up the background like priests with shaven crowns, but all with beauteous vestments sweeping to their feet, running over the plains between them, up the adjacent ones, round the next—an interminable reticulation of life and loveliness. The embroidery on God’s footstool is here wrought with a lavish and loving hand.

Wonderful tropics! The normal home of man; the only soil and sun in which could grow the fair and fatal tree of knowledge or of life.

No sinister cold, no smoke-tarnished atmosphere, no death-bearing fogs, no fierce animal energy, no gross crimes; all is sunny and perpetual youth. Eden unquestionably was not more than twenty-three or thirty degrees from the equator. But the intermittent flash of the light in the tower of the Morro startles every half minute the sudden nightfall, and we hasten to return, in love with nature, and reconciled to ourselves.Monday, March 13th.—This morning came Mr. R——, bringing an unexpected armful of books, with which we are to equip ourselves for a visit to the country, where we are making arrangements to go. Commenced the morning by chess, in which I am now habitually ruined, and ended, as usual, by a long conversation, in which I am listener-in-chief, an interested if not a brilliant or eloquent one.

Mr. R—— is a Romanist, but I learn from him more of the corruption of the clergy of the island than an uninitiated Protestant or Romanist either could invent. Priests in the country are badly salaried, often unable to get enough to pay their cooking and washing. So they become entangled in a peculiar kind of reciprocity with some negress or quadroon, who in time comes to live openly with them, and is recognized, and not unfrequently respected and acknowledged socially, as the mother of their large families. I find residents here indignant at visitors who come and skip over the surface of the country, necessarily, if they write at all, as superficial as false and absurd. Madame ——’s book is said to be a tissue of falsehoods, as well as that of D——, which I had supposed photographic. Every one, in fact, but Humboldt, has assumed a knowledge to hide ignorance. Cuba seems to be the least abused because least investigated country which has got into books.

Mr. R—— accepted our invitation to dinner. Like all Frenchmen, he prefers claret to other wines, and, like all old men who wish to live long, eats nothing.

Thursday, 15th.—Who can wonder that sailors never tire of seeing the sea. With what a loyal instinct the old retired captain seeks the shelter of some wave-worn cliff where the familiar spray may kiss his weather-beaten cheek, and the cry of the deep be the lullaby of his last sleep. Primeval forests want light; prairies are “stale and flat” if not “unprofitable;” mountain ranges, those petrified waves of earth, are groups of individuals: but ocean is one, an adequate expression of extent illimitable, of bulk immeasurable, of depth unfathomable, of force irresistible, of life everlasting. It is the eternity of time. But here in Cuba, where so much is transitory and fugitive, where the accumulation of wealth to expend elsewhere is the aim of all, the Æsthetic claims of the sea are unregarded. The backs of the houses are universally turned towards it. The Cubans smother palaces in narrow streets, rejecting the air which has learned purity and inspiration from the sea, for siroccos of dust and heat. Ugly wharves abound, so do batteries to make might right. It is only in refinement without degeneracy, in taste without tinsel, in wealth without avarice, that you find the loving adornment of ocean’s shores.

We rode, while thinking and saying these things, to Chomero, a little bay with little cottages on its little sandy shore; little shrubs, little shells, and little life. A square fort guards it in sinister silence; a large railway station promises to turn the little Chomero into the large suburban Carmelo, and straight streets, straight avenues, and right angles threaten to make it as ugly as the tasteless plans of architects could devise.

But deliciously sweet is the air; deliciously sweet the new old story of the sea, and deliciously sweet the mareschino with which we flavor our aqua pura. All things return to their original starting point. Existence is a rounding of circles. The sun, a tired prodigal, returns to the parent arms of the horizon; like Socrates, his last act is to bathe, which he does in the returning tide, and he returns to el Hotel de la Reina, there to chat with Father, C—— or play with SeÑor R——, or, better still, to lounge on the sofas and fan our tropical thoughts into tropical dreams.

Saturday, 17th.—At last our days are come to have a family resemblance. I must even confess to a kind of monotony, a stereotypedness, in their lineaments. I grow to look upon all these extravagant novelties with sang froid, to ride through the streets reclining in my volante with rarely being amused, and never startled, that Spanish gentlemen sitting against the walls in rows, or standing at the corners in groups, one and all, smile and bow, as if I were an old friend. I am not a bit shocked to see negro and Creole and Spanish little boys standing in the doors or running about at play with more backs than shirts—in short, as innocent of clothing as their great-greatest-grandpapa was when, overtaken by that unfortunate after-dinner nap, and the angel performed the delicate surgical operation of taking the still crooked rib from his side, and was not obliged to waken him by unbuttoning his jacket. I can promenade the balcony of our hotel without any uncomfortable nervousness because all the upper and under clerks in the store opposite collect at once to gape and criticize and express in some way the admiration a Cuban gentleman is conscientiously bound to feel whenever he sees a wonder. I can see the lottery venders thrust their tickets into my hand at the corner of every street when going to church, in all public places and most private ones, without one puritanical spasm. I am obliged to find Sunday turned into a general holiday without thinking an earthquake is coming to-morrow, and to hear the ship’s bell and car’s whistle mingling with the church bell without expecting a consequent and immediate steam-boiler explosion. I have even ceased wondering at this eternity of sunshine, and find it is silly to keep expecting blindness from its piercing light. I forgot to inquire why it cannot scald these deliciously cool breezes, or why these strong airs, always blowing upon the sunshine, as if it were a great plateful of hot gumbo soup, cannot manage to cool it.

If it be true that many microscopic beings which are vegetables in the shade become ripened into animals in the sun, then what happens to animals that live in the sun as much as we do? what are we to ripen to? Angels naturally—but sadly sunburnt.

This evening, my first acquaintance with a Creole, and one who is not only willing, but proud, to own it. He speaks English hesitatingly and solves a difficult riddle—it is possible for a Creole countenance to express, not only intellectuality, but genius, even spirituality. How polite are these people! Being an amateur artist, he invited me to-morrow to his studio; offered at once to contribute to my portefolio, and to lend any pictures I may choose to copy while on the island. Conversation turning upon the famous cascarilla, a powder made of eggshells, and universally used on the skin by these ladies to make black white, all the gentlemen, strange to say, advocated its use. Upon this I expressed an intention of getting some immediately and using it liberally. SeÑor at once replied, “Oh, I shall be only too happy to send it to you!” and sure enough, after he left, a beautifully ornamented box of the ornament, found itself on my dressing-table.

You must never express a particular admiration for any thing one of these people possesses, or he will at once present it to you, from his plantation to his pipe; and the latter is the surer test of his politeness. The other day I asked Mr. R—— where I could find a bookstore keeping some little views of Havana. The same evening came a great book containing all I wished, beautifully executed. Last evening on the Cortena, he took out a little microscope to examine some parasitic flowers I had gathered from the walls of the Cathedral (all the old walls of buildings are covered with such plants). I could not help exclaiming at the great power and convenience of the little instrument, when, what should come this morning but Mr. R—— with a bright new microscope in his hand, begging I would do him the favor to accept it!

With all our interest in this Creole, I could not help a sensation of relief, when he rose to bid us good-night. It is so difficult talking with a foreigner who can only comprehend your simplest words, which express your simplest ideas. You feel like a child talking to a child, knowing all the time that you are without the innocence or beauty of children. And this repression of thought, instead of repressing the voice, gives one an unconquerable instinct to raise it to its highest pitch. One seems to think that an immense quantity of sound will hide an immense lack of sense; that they do not understand because they do not hear; that one is not so dumb as they are deaf.

Sunday, March 18th.—For the first time the heat is oppressive, enervating. We did not even summon courage for the early mass, the only religious service in a city which can boast one distinguishing peculiarity—it practises as much as it preaches, for it almost never preaches at all. What is better than the Cortina when you talk of fresh airs, and fresh shade, and fresh silence? So for the Cortina we set out, stopping by the way at the Cathedral. Here we find half a dozen sincere-looking devotees kneeling in different parts of the quaint, cool, serene temple; humble their birth, no doubt, as well as posture, for they kneel upon the bare marble, with no mat and no appearance of discomfort. When prayers are said and crossing done, they depart, silent and unnoticed as they enter; and we, with only the gratification of curiosity where worship should be, do the same.

Arrived at the promenade, we find an insinuating mist and an unusual event, a south wind, legitimatizing all this languor. Everybody in Havana pouts when the wind hails from the equator, and shivers when it comes out of a temperate zone. Both changes are so slight that a Northerner, accustomed as he is to the fiercely rapid changes at home, observes nothing different from usual. The ordinary wind here, which baffles all the scorching proclivities of this sunshine; which comes fresh and unworn over the salt and laboring seas; which makes this island an Eden of never-failing green,—this strong and pure, and gentle, as all that is strong should be, angel of mercy, is always an east wind. I am glad that I came to Havana to learn that the sole errand of an east wind in the world is not to manufacture influenzas, consumptions, gout-twinges, blue devils, and growlery-mongers.

To-night a long conversation with Father C—— who has just returned from an expedition to the interior for the purpose of collecting contributions for “me chur-r-r-rch” in Ireland. We talked of the Eucharist, of confessions, of indulgences, of rites and popes; in half an hour I learned more of Romanism from a Romanist’s point of view, than in a liberal share of twenty-eight years of my former life. He confessed that the corruptions of the church forced on the Reformation. I am sure the wary priest rather more than half expected to convert me, and I amused myself down in my sleeve at his amiable hallucination, while at the same time I reflected how surely the fogs of prejudice and sectarianism clear away before the inevitably advancing sun of knowledge.