THE FLORIDA POCAHONTAS. 145 



and action — romance in history and in fiction, m dress, 

 in races, and the love of man and woman, and all the 

 world was tame when compared with this El Dorado. 

 Here was the warrior's field ; here the adventurer's goal; 

 and hither came the poet to sing of Eden. Here landod 

 the courtly and refined cavaliers of the most cliivalrous 

 nation of the earth. In an age of discovery, when all 

 the world was intoxicated by those vistas of wealth and 

 novelty that the Genoese opened to the ardent, no one 

 Arcadian land loomed from the waters of the Occident, 

 so clad in purple, so vocal with music, so voluptuous with 

 beauty, as this so-called Island of Florida. 



*'Its discovery was wrought by, and illustrates the 

 romance of the age. Ponce de Leon was a hidalgo of 

 Sj)am — noble, accomplished, and reno^vned. With grey 

 hairs had come honors and high command in the Indian 

 Islands, when the tales of his mistress, a Carib girl, told 

 him of a spring whose waters would bring back the fire 

 of youthj and renew his wasted years. This fountain 

 was situated on the coast of the great Mexican Gulf, 

 where the oak, when dropping into the sea, is trans- 

 formed into coral groves, its pendent moss waves beneath 

 the waters changed into sea-fins, while, mirrored in the 

 sea, the scarlet flamingoes reflect the colors of Paradise. 



" The old knight sailed with his cavaliers in search of 

 this fountam, and landed among the mangrove bowers and 

 painted birds of the western coast, on Easter-day or day 

 of flowers of the year 1512, and thence baptized the newly- 

 discovered land by the name of Florida. Not finding the 



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