?" 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.

Unexpectedly brought back to the stern realities of life by a great
affliction, I wished to destroy every link that connected me with the
six years I had thrown away. It was at this period that Strakosch wrote
to me, offering an engagement for a tour of concerts through the United
States. I hesitated an instant; one sad look was cast upon the vanished
days, I breathed a regret, and--signed. The dream was over; I was saved;
but who could say, if, in the rescue, youth and poetry had not perished?
Poetry and youth are of a volatile mood,--t