A LOST FEBRUARY 



Only where the superb roads and bridle-paths lay 

 them open, can you thread their interiors. And there 

 you walk betwee-n walls of rank vegetation, — no 

 glimpses along forest aisles and corridors, no long, 

 cool perspectives, no leaf-strewn floors of checkered 

 sunlight and shadow, no interior housed and 

 cloistered effects at all. Apparently the woods in 

 Jamaica are never swept by fire any more than 

 they are in Alaska; the dense ground vegetation 

 and the humidity secure them against the besom of 

 the flames. The trees cast their leaves one by one, 

 apparently, the year through, hke the human tree: 

 always falling leaves, always new buds and blos- 

 soms. We saw wild blackberries (poor things), with 

 ripe fruit and green, and just opened blossoms. 

 The word sylvan belongs to higher latitudes. There 

 are lairs and jungles and smothering dungeons in 

 tropical forests, but no clean, restful sylvan solitude. 

 How much the beauty of our northern land- 

 scape owes to grass, — this green nap or pile of the 

 fields and hills, so tender, so uniform, so human- 

 izing, softening the outlines, tempering the light, 

 loving the snow and the moisture, bringing out 

 the folds and dimples of plain and slope, and cloth- 

 ing the northern mountains as with veils of green 

 gauze! The tropical grasses are coarse, broad- 

 leafed, — crab grass, Bahama grass, Guinea grass, 

 — good forage, but not pleasing to look upon, and 

 the landscape is but slightly affected by them. 



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