We are now enjoying moonlight nights, about which so many have so much rhapsodized. There is no doubt that the nocturnal appearance of the heavens in this latitude contrasts with a Northern one in the same manner that two paintings differ--the warmth, richness, and brilliancy of the one being in opposition to the poverty and indistinctness of the other. On account of the latitude, there is no twilight--the "fairy web of day is never hung out"--but from blazing sunshine into darkness we are at once precipitated--no witchery or poetry to be found between the magic hours intervening.
Every season finds a large number of nice people at this place, who require a change of climate, from the severity of cold, piercing winds, to the blandness of an Indian summer. The care-worn come to rest, writers to find inspiration; for here, fanned by the sea-breeze, does not "light-winged fancy" travel at a swifter pace in the daylight? and when night comes, lulled by the surf, we can listen to the "great sea calling from its secret depths."
The inquiry is often made by those who have never visited here, How do you kill time in that ancient city? To the historian, there is no spot so well adapted to meditation on the past, where associations are awakened with greater rapidity, when the Indians held undisputed sway, only dreaming of plenty and the happy hunting-grounds beyond; but, suddenly as the Montezuma monarch, their territory was wrested from them by the Spaniards, whom these unlettered savages at first regarded as children of the Great Spirit; but when the ensigns of authority were unfurled, their country overran by myrmidons, and the power of their cazique sneered at, then the illusion vanished--the truth dawning that they were only sojourners whose presence did not add to the happiness of the newly self-constituted sovereigns of their country.
Three distinct classes of visitors come here--the defiant, the enthusiastic, and the indifferent. The defiant spend their time in assailing, "with vehement irony," every thing with which they are placed in contact, ringing changes upon any thing disagreeable to them, until their companions are wearied beyond measure. 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. Why he ever thought of leaving home to travel, when with his undemonstrative nature he appears so oblivious to all scenes and sights around him, is an unsolved problem. He maintains an unbroken reticence on every occasion, the mantle of silence being thrown about all his movements, while his general appearance evinces the same amount of refinement as a polar bear, his perceptive powers the acuteness of an oyster, his stupidity greater than Balaam's saddle-animal.