IV.

The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something
impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler
zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best
understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet
there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days
which is not of the Antilles,--a spirituality, as of eternal tropical
spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up
his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;--it was indeed
under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of
Southern havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a
something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels
awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic: and
reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the
Pneuma indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great Blue
Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,--save the low land
under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny
green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly,
caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you:
out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift into
delicious oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the
substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite
Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away
forever....

And this day-magic of azure endures sometimes for months together.
Cloudlessly the dawn reddens up through a violet east:

there is no speck upon the blossoming of its Mystical Rose,--unless it
be the silhouette of some passing gull, whirling his sickle-wings
against the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats higher, the flood
shifts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray, yet flickering with the
morning gold, it is the vision of John,--the apocalyptic Sea of Glass
mixed with fire;--again, with the growing breeze, it takes that
incredible purple tint familiar mostly to painters of West Indian
scenery;--once more, under the blaze of noon, it changes to a waste of
broken emerald. With evening, the horizon assumes tints of
inexpressible sweetness,--pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk and
fire; and in the west are topaz-glowings and wondrous flushings as of
nacre. Then, if the sea sleeps, it dreams of all these,