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; each whole is so
sharply defined between its base-line of sea and its background of
sky, that, like a statue, each island is compact and complete in
itself, an isolated and self-dependent organism; and therefore, like
every beautiful statue, it looks much smaller than it is. So
perfect this isolation seems, that one fancies, at moments, that the
island does not rise out of the sea, but floats upon it; that it is
held in place, not by the roots of the mountains, and deep miles of
lava-wall below, but by the cloud which has caught it by the top,
and will not let it go. Let that cloud but rise, and vanish, and
the whole beautiful thing will be cast adrift; ready to fetch way
before the wind, and (as it will seem often enough to do when viewed
through a cabin-port) to slide silently past you, while you are
sliding past it.