unrise which
repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling,
triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery,
it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence.
It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent
pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and
the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal
joys and widowed tears of Eos, re-invents itself in the human mind,
as soon as it asserts its power--it may be, its sacred right--to
translate nature into the language of the feelings.

And, meanwhile, may we not ask--have we not a right--founded on that
common sense of the heart which often is the deepest reason--to ask,
If we, gross and purblind mortals, can perceive and sympathise with
so much beauty in the universe, then how much must not He perceive,
with how much must not He sympathise, for whose pleasure all things
are, and were created? Who that believes (and rightly) the sense of
beauty to be among the noblest faculties of man, will deny that
faculty to God, who conceived man and all besides?

Wednesday, the 15th, was a really tropic day; blazing heat in the
forenoon, with the thermometer at 82 degrees in the shade, and in
the afternoon stifling clouds from the south-west, where a dark band
of rain showed, according to the planters' dictum, showers over the
islands, which we were nearing fast. At noon we were only two
hundred and ten miles from Sombrero, 'the Spanish Hat,' a lonely
island, which is here the first outlier of the New World. We ought
to have passed it by sunrise on the 16th, and by the afternoon
reached St. Thomas's, where our pleasant party would burst like a
shell in all directions, and scatter its fragments about all coasts
and isles--from Demerara to Panama, from Mexico to the Bahamas. So
that day was to the crew a day of hard hot work--of lifting and
sorting goods on the main-deck, in readiness for the arrival at St.
Thomas's, and of moving forwards two huge empty boilers which had
graced our spar-deck, filled with barrels of onions and potatoes,
all the way from Southampton. But in the soft hot evening hours,
time was found for the usual dance on the quarter-deck, with the
band under the awning, and lamps throwing fantastic shadows, and
waltzing couples, and the crew clustering aft to see, while we old
folks looked on, with our 'Ludite dum lubet,