The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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After my letters from Hawaii, and their narratives of volcanoes,
freshets, and out of the world valleys, you will think my present
letters dull, so I must begin this one pleasantly, by telling you
that though I have no stirring adventures to relate, I am enjoying
myself and improving again in health, and that the people are
hospitable, genial, and cultivated, and that Kauai, though
altogether different from Hawaii, has an extreme beauty altogether
its own, which wins one's love, though it does not startle one into
admiration like that of the Hawaiian gulches. Is it because that,
though the magic of novelty is over it, there is a perpetual
undercurrent of home resemblance? The dash of its musical waters
might be in Cumberland; its swelling uplands, with their clumps of
trees, might be in Kent; and then again, steep, broken, wooded
ridges, with glades of grass, suggest the Val Moutiers; and broader
sweeps of mountain outline, the finest scenery of the Alleghanies.
But yet the very things which have a certain tenderness of
familiarity, are in a foreign setting. The great expanse of restful
sea, so faintly blue all day, and so faintly red in the late
afternoon, is like no other ocean in its unutterable peace; and this
joyous, riotous trade-wind, which rustles the trees all day, and
falls asleep at night, and cools the air, seems to come from some
widely different laboratory than that in which our vicious east
winds, and damp west winds, and piercing north winds, and
suffocating south winds are concocted.
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