Chapter I

When you find yourself for the first time, upon some unshadowed day, in the delightful West Indian city of St. Pierre,--supposing that you own the sense of poetry, the recollections of a student,--there is apt to steal upon your fancy an impression of having seen it all before, ever so long ago,--you cannot tell where. The sensation of some happy dream you cannot wholly recall might be compared to this feeling. In the simplicity and solidity of the quaint architecture,--in the eccentricity of bright narrow streets, all aglow with warm coloring,--in the tints of roof and wall, antiquated by streakings and patchings of mould greens and grays,--in the startling absence of window-sashes, glass, gas lamps, and chimneys,--in the blossom-tenderness of the blue heaven, the splendor of tropic light, and the warmth of the tropic wind,--you find less the impression of a scene of to-day than the sensation of something that was and is not. Slowly this feeling strengthens with your pleasure in the colorific radiance of costume,--the semi-nudity of passing figures,--the puissant shapeliness of torsos ruddily swart like statue metal,--the rounded outline of limbs yellow as tropic fruit,--the grace of attitudes,--the unconscious harmony of groupings,--the gathering and folding and falling of light robes that oscillate with swaying of free hips,--the sculptural symmetry of unshod feet. You look up and down the lemon-tinted streets,--down to the dazzling azure brightness of meeting sky and sea; up to the perpetual verdure of mountain woods--wondering at the mellowness of tones, the sharpness of lines in the light, the diaphaneity of colored shadows; always asking memory: "When?... where did I see all this... long ago?"...

Then, perhaps, your gaze is suddenly riveted by the vast and solemn beauty of the verdant violet-shaded mass of the dead Volcano,--high-towering above the town, visible from all its ways, and umbraged, maybe, with thinnest curlings of cloud,--like spectres of its ancient smoking to heaven. And all at once the secret of your dream is revealed, with the rising of many a luminous memory,--dreams of the Idyllists, flowers of old Sicilian song, fancies limned upon Pompeiian walls. For a moment the illusion is delicious: you comprehend as never before the charm of a vanished world,--the antique life, the story of terra-cottas and graven stones and gracious things exhumed: even the sun is not of to-day, but of twenty centuries gone;--thus, and under such a light, walked the women of the elder world. You know the fancy absurd;--that the power of the orb has visibly abated nothing in all the eras of man,--that millions are the ages of his almighty glory; but for one instant of reverie he seemeth larger,--even that sun impossible who coloreth the words, coloreth the works of artist-lovers of the past, with the gold light of dreams.

Too soon the hallucination is broken by modern sounds, dissipated by modern sights,--rough trolling of sailors descending to their boats,--the heavy boom of a packet's signal-gun,--the passing of an American buggy. Instantly you become aware that the melodious tongue spoken by the passing throng is neither Hellenic nor Roman: only the beautiful childish speech of French slaves.