194 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



Many years later the imagination of another American writer 

 was stimulated by Bartram's description of a Florida fountain. 

 Lafcadio Hearn in his Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist 

 sketches just such a fountain and his imagery reads indeed like 

 " sublimated Bartram." ^ Hearn's fountain is " a flood of fluid 

 crystal," eight miles long. Even where it is fifty feet deep every 

 pebble can be seen, " every atom of sparkling sand "; ^° " fishes 

 shoot by like flashes of opal." The source of the fountain is a 

 great basin. " From what unilluminated caverns," asks Hearn, 

 " what subterranean lakes, — burst this prodigious flow.^ " ^^ Bar- 

 tram's fountain is six miles long; its water is so " transparent " 

 that he could see " the sandy bottom, and the several nations 

 of fish, passing and repassing each other " (p. 159). Bartram 

 enters this " pellucid stream " and sails " over the heads of 

 innumerable squadrons of fish, which, although many feet deep 

 in the water, were distinctly to be seen " (p. 160) . There is 

 implied wonder in his notation: "just under my feet was the 

 inchanting and amazing chrystal fountain, which incessantly 

 threw up, from dark, rocky caverns below, tons of water every 

 minute, forming a bason . . ." (p. 165) . One passage in Hearn 

 is especially significant: 



I sank to sleep and dreamed. ... It seemed to me that I was 

 floating, — lying in a canoe, and all alone, — down some dark and noise- 

 less current, — between forests endless and vast. . . . White mosses 

 dropped to sweep my face; phantoms of cypress put forth long hands 

 to seize. Again I saw the writhing and the nodding of the palms. . . . 

 And still I drifted with the mighty stream, feeling less than an insect 

 in those ever-growing enormities ; and a thin Voice like a wind came 

 v/eirdly questioning: "How! thou dreamer of dreams! — hast ever 

 dreamed aught like unto this .'' — This is the Architecture of God ! " ^^ 



Here Bartram's ability to give himself to nature, to " loaf and 

 invite " his soul, to see his rich, subtrocial country with eyes in 

 which aesthetic pleasure merges with mystic wonder — here it 

 all finds a congenial echo in Lafcadio Hearn, himself a strange 

 exotic of nature. 



* Xanadu, p. 587. 



'^° Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist (1911), p. 56. 



^^Ibid.,p.57. ^^ Ibid., p. 55. 



