s, gigantic timber. Not a rock is seen. If
there be a cliff here and there, it is as green as an English lawn.
Steep slopes are gray with groo-groo palms, {33} or yellow with
unknown flowering trees. High against the sky-line, tiny knots and
lumps are found to be gigantic trees. Each glen has buried its
streamlet a hundred feet in vegetation, above which, here and there,
the gray stem and dark crown of some palmiste towers up like the
mast of some great admiral. The eye and the fancy strain vainly
into the green abysses, and wander up and down over the wealth of
depths and heights, compared with which European parks and woodlands
are but paltry scrub and shaugh. No books are needed to tell that.
The eye discovers it for itself, even before it has learnt to judge
of the great size of the vegetation, from the endless variety of
form and colour. For the islands, though green intensely, are not
of one, but of every conceivable green, or rather of hues ranging
from pale yellow through all greens into cobalt blue; and as the
wind stirs the leaves, and sweeps the lights and shadows over hill
and glen, all is ever-changing, iridescent, like a peacock's neck;
till the whole island, from peak to shore, seems some glorious
jewel--an emerald with tints of sapphire and topaz, hanging between
blue sea and white surf below, and blue sky and white cloud above.

If the reader fancies that I exaggerate, let him go and see. Let
him lie for one hour off the Rosseau at Dominica. Let him sail down
the leeward side of Guadaloupe, down the leeward side of what island
he will, and judge for himself how poor, and yet how tawdry, my
words are, compared with the luscious yet magnificent colouring of
the Antilles.

The traveller, at least so I think, would remark also, with some
surprise, the seeming smallness of these islands. The Basse Terre
of Guadaloupe, for instance, is forty miles in length. As you lie
off it, it does not look half, or even a quarter, of that length;
and that, not merely because the distances north and south are
foreshortened, or shut in by nearer headlands. The causes, I
believe, are more subtle and more complex. First, the novel
clearness of the air, which makes the traveller, fresh from misty
England, fancy every object far nearer, and therefore far smaller,
than it actually is. Next the simplicity of form. Each outer line
trends upward so surely toward a single focus;