Florimond

“ The Fountain of Youth, sought for in vain by Ponce de Leon three hundred and seventy years ago, is in Florida. Time has not dried up the source of its health-giving, its life-giving, waters. They flow as of yore, and every one who thirsteth can partake of them freely. Invalids and pleasure-seekers find it in our glorious climate, in our invigorating breezes, which blow as soft and balmy as those from Ceylon’s isle; in our beautiful flowers and almost perpetual verdure, and in the total absence of the chilling winds and frosts of the North and West, which render life almost unendurable. ”

“ Never had the eyes of white men beheld this land of beauty before. English ships had sailed along the coast to the north, finding much of it bleak and uninviting. The caravels of Columbus had threaded the glowing line of tropic isles, and later ships had borne settlers to these lands of promise. But the rich southlands of the continent had never before been seen, and well was this unknown realm of beauty named Florida by the Spanish chief, whether by this name he meant to call it the "land of flowers" or referred to the Spanish name for Easter, Pascua Florida. ”

“ That’s driving a little boat through pernickety country some. My, but this cold norther feels good and the air is fit to breathe. We were not sorry to bid good-bye to Florida yesterday morning. It is a queer puzzle of a country and I understand it not at all. A land filled with hope, enthusiasm and speculative boom on one side; with poverty, want and failure just around the corner. A land of sweltering, enervating days and nights. A country full of dark, silent, mysterious places and fringed with bright, sparkling beaches. A land of creeping, crawling things and of big birds with broad wings. ”

“ A garland of dark green wood, resembling myrtle, surrounds the great lake, for at this distance we cannot distinguish between groves of orange and palmetto and forests of cypress. The whole shore is low, and the lake as clear as a mirror, and everything profoundly still around it. No cities and towns, no steamboats, no boats of any kind, no human beings, excepting ourselves, the Florida travellers. Here is infant land, nay, almost wild land still. But how glad I am to be now in the poetical wilderness of Florida, to have seen something of its marvellous, natural poetry! ”

“ One cannot do everything.
Now, alas, Florida seems very far off. I am never likely to walk again under those New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all that beauty of the Hillsborough. And yet, in a truer and better sense of the word, I do see it, and shall. What a heavenly light falls at this moment on the river and the island woods! Perhaps we must come back to Wordsworth, after all,—
“The light that never was, on sea or land.” ”

“ The ride through Florida is tedious. The miles of palmettoes, with leaves glittering like racks of bared cutlasses in the sun, the miles of dark swamp, in which the cypresses seem to wade like dismal club-footed men, the miles of live-oak strung with their sad tattered curtains of Spanish moss, the miles of sandy waste, of pineapple [Pg 593] and orange groves, of pines with feathery palm-like tops, above all the sifting of fine Florida dust, which covers everything inside the car as with a coat of flour—these make you wish that you were North again. ”

“ The enthusiastic rise more or less on the wings of their fertile imagination, when exaggerated accounts, highly colored, are written about Florida as it appeared to them—the change from the North to a land clothed in the perpetual verdure of spring-time being so great, they were enraptured in a manner that others of less delicate susceptibilities have failed to realize. The indifferent tourist is an anomaly to everybody. ”

“ In February, 1888, I went to see the Americans taking their pleasure in Florida. During the months of January, February, and March, flocks of society people from the great towns in the north go to Florida, where the sun is warm, and the orange trees are in full beauty of fruit and flower. Jacksonville and St. Augustine are in winter what Saratoga, Newport, and Long Branch are in summer: the rendezvous of all who have any pretension to a place in the fashionable world. ”

“ His style is eminently dry and difficult to labor through, and must ever confine the History to the shelf as a work of reference, and to the closet of the painful student. Yet with all its faults—and they are neither few nor slight—this is the most complete work ever published concerning the territory of Florida; it is the fruit of years of laborious investigation, of absorbing devotion to one object, often of keen mental and bodily suffering, and will ever remain a witness to the energy and zeal of its writer. ”

“ We know how intimately connected is the worship of the sun with the veneration of water; heat typifying the masculine, moisture the feminine principle. The universality of their association in the Old World cosmogonies and mythologies is too well-known to need specification, and it is quite as invariable in those of the New Continent. That such magnificent springs as occur in Florida should have become objects of special veneration, and their fame bruited far and wide, and handed down from father to son, is a most natural consequence in such faiths. ”

“ Florida is so watery and vine-tied that pathless wanderings are not easily possible in any direction. I started to cross the State by a gap hewn for the locomotive, walking sometimes between the rails, stepping from tie to tie, or walking on the strip of sand at the sides, gazing into the mysterious forest, Nature’s own. It is impossible to write the dimmest picture of plant grandeur so redundant, unfathomable. ”

“ Everything grows with a spontaneity that is surprising—fruits and flowers everywhere in the woods and wildernesses in wild luxuriance. The very nature of things seems to be reversed; pears grow on graceful vines, peas on stately trees, and some things (as witness the air plant) grow on nothing at all. But in spite of the richness of the soil, the geniality of the climate, Florida is not exactly a paradise; here as elsewhere man must carry out the great law, and labour for his daily bread. Nature is prolific, and yields her treasures ungrudgingly, but she demands something in return. ”

“ The river Perdido being its western, and the Apalachicola its eastern limit.
The capital of East Florida is St. Augustin; that of West Florida, Pensacola.
During the struggle of Great Britain with her American colonies in 1781; Spain took forcible possession of Florida, and it was confirmed to that crown by the treaty of peace in 1783.
The climate of the Floridas, is for the most part tolerably good; in the summer it is very hot; the winters cold, and the rivers are frequently frozen during that season. Inland, and on the mountains, the air is very pure and salubrious. ”

“ Favored indeed is Florida, not only in climate, scenery, and fruit, but with the munificence of these mighty-hearted millionaires, who have Alladin-like metamorphosed the sunny peninsula into a veritable fairyland. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. H. B. Plant, who has transmogrified Tampa, and ribboned Florida with his railroad system. As usual with men of great minds and means, he is wholly unpretentious, as much so as his humblest employee. ”

“ Miss Dix, who came by steamer to Savannah, has joined our little party, as she also wishes to visit Florida. The weather is glorious, the moon is at the full, and I am full of the desire for travelling, and the desire to see Florida, the flower of the Southern States, the land of which the delicious balmy odours made the Spaniards believe that the fountain of eternal youth was hidden there. And now—thither, thither, to taste its nectar!
The Magnolia, May 17. Very seldom are letters written from a steamer which lies on a green meadow ”

“ The face of the country, skirting on the seaboard, from Cape Hatteras hither, is low, level, and sandy. This feature prevails southward to near Cape Florida; when the rock-bound shore, the rudiments of which begin with the coquina formation opposite the city, again is made the barrier against the encroachments of the sea, and continues until it is broken up among the keys of the Florida archipelago.
The country around the city, is a plain of sandy shell soil, termed “pine barren.” ”

“ In accordance with Spanish usage, under the term Florida, he embraced all that part of the continent north of Mexico, and consequently but a comparatively small portion is concerned with the history of the peninsula. What there is, however, renders it the most complete, and in many cases, the only source of information. The account of the French colonies is minute, but naturally quite one-sided. He is “in all points an apologist for his countrymen, and an implacable enemy to the Heretics, the unfortunate Huguenots, who hoped to find an asylum from persecution in the forests of the New World.” ”

“ To the rough, practical Northern mind, Florida{10} is a land of dreams, a strange country full of surprises, an intangible sort of a place, where at first nothing is believed to be real and where finally everything is considered to be possible. When the visitor first arrives he cannot be convinced that the cows feed under water; before he leaves he is willing to concede that alligators may live on chestnuts. The animals and birds are as queer and unnatural as the herbage, or as a climate which furnishes strawberries, green peas, shad, and roses at Christmas. ”

“ In leaving Jacksonville, we supposed we were leaving all this behind us, not knowing that Florida is full of quaint jewelry made, as the jewelry of no other part of the world, out of fish scales, saurian teeth, sea beans, shells, orange tree woods, and sharks’ molars; that everywhere there are wonderful stories which only differ from one another in size; that palmetto hats were to be bought in every village store, and that sour oranges hang from innumerable trees, valueless for traffic, and only begging to be made into nectar fit for gods. ”

“ For the twenty years that Florida remained in possession of Great Britain, great improvements were made, flourishing settlements begun; and the prosperity which industry and skill insure began to show itself on every side. In 1784, the Floridas were retroceded to Spain. The Anglo-Saxon race forsook their fields and villages, and retired under the shield of British law and the Protestant faith. ”

“ CHAPTER I OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF ALL GROWING THINGS IN FLORIDA—OF PAW-PAWS AND PROSPECTUSES AND PERFECT THIRTY-FOURS—OF FIENDS IN HUMAN SHAPE—AND OF THE WATCHFULNESS OF THE NATIVES FOR INSULTS
Everything grows in Florida. That is to say, everything grows in Florida that Florida people want to grow. That is Florida’s specialty: growing. Occasionally a few things get out of hand and indulge in some over-enthusiastic growing when Florida people wish that they wouldn’t; but for the most part Florida is proud of the remarkable growths that take place within her boundaries. ”

“ Then I laughed, and I suppose that broke the spell, but it was enough to make anyone laugh, for the Florida heron, wading leg deep in the St. Johns River, has the same self-conscious dignity, the same absurd rhythmic hesitancy of motion as a wedding procession going up the aisle. I have seen a great many grooms wade in and I never saw anything a bit different.
The high road and high noon and I met in the heart of a pine wood where all things had forgotten the frost in a midsummer temperature, and short-horned grasshoppers made merry all about. ”

“ Along this famous peninsula the sea rolls with ceaseless beat upon some of the most gorgeous beaches of the American coast. To the glories of tropical vegetation and the charms of the climate, Florida thus adds the magnificence of its unrivalled marine environment. ”

“ FLORIDA is a large and fruitful country in North America, bounded on the north-east by Carolina, on the south, and some part of the west, by New Galicia and some countries not yet discovered. The air is very temperate, and soil extremely fertile, and produces grain, herbs, and fruit in great abundance. Ferdinando Soto, after the conquest of Peru, entered this country May 25, 1538, and gave it the name Florida, because the flowers were then on the ground, but died of grief, for being disappointed of the treasures which he expected. ”

“ Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a land of flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so. Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the cars through miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, on this Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of the climbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I saw none here) , and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantana and white honeysuckle. ”

“ And for this industry, which we may perhaps properly call the most ancient, fundamental, necessary, stable, wholesome, honorable and delightful of all the occupations in which men are engaged, Florida has advantages of soil, climate, rainfall and location greater, on the whole, than those enjoyed by any other state of the American union. This is being recognized in increasing measure, far and wide. The eyes of discerning and experienced men are being turned this way as never before. ”