Theodore Winthrop

“ But though a wild nature still rules undisturbed over the greater portion of the scene before us, yet man has thrust his so-called civilization upon the scene, and that rusty spot that disturbs the purity of the view is one of his beauty-destroying abodes. Those shabby, tiled buildings, those dirty church-spires, and huts like ant-hills surrounding, are Panama,— while a suburb more important than the parent city is represented by a few black spots upon the water, capacious edifices, that move to and fro with the surplus population of the town. ”

“ It would be perhaps an hour before day, but still night, — a night of clear, soft, yet brilliant star light; and there the stars do not glitter with the steely sharpness of a northern sky, but glow; they do not snap out a lively twinkle, but slowly flicker and sway; their light grows upon the eye, as the light of a revolving lighthouse across a stretch of sea. ”

“ The cool night-breeze would be breathing over the water, freshening as the dawn came on. Wreaths of mist were floating away on the mainland and clinging to the mountainous points of the bay, where perhaps too a black rain-cloud lay lowering. For each climate are its own atmospheric beauties. Nowhere but in England and the Low Countries should you study effects of sunlight through mist and rain-clouds. There is no purple in the world like the purple of Hymettus. Never but at a Florentine sunset can you touch light made tangible, and grasp it, and bathe in it, and be upborne by it. ”

“ Back of this, and between our view-point and the site of the old town, spread broad savannas, carpeted, like a park, with soft, close-shaven turf; the cattle of a thousand hills graze quietly over its undisturbed surface, and, when the sun blazes, can take refuge in some of the rich groves or close thickets of tropical shrubbery which are picturesquely scattered over its surface, or follow the scanty water-courses. Smooth and carefully kept, like the fair meadows of an English landscape, appear these natural grazing-farms ”

“ The Bay The residents of Panama think no more of the slight fevers of the country, than we do of a severe cold or influenza. You call to pay morning compliments to a lady with whom you have had a passage of arms at the ball of the evening before, and are told quietly that she teine calenturas (has the fever) , and is not visible. In a day or two she reappears, undimmed. The fevers of the gentlemen only come on, like colds at a college, when they have unpleasant duties to perform. ”

“ A few huts straggle along this, near the town, sheltered by a grove of cocoanut-trees, which serve as parasols or umbrellas, and, while their occasional droppings keep down the super abundant infant population, they at the same time accustom the more warlike to the dangers of a bombardment. ”