it was with me at New Smyrna, where I lived for three weeks. I had gone
there for the sake of the river, and my first impulse was to take the
road that runs southerly along its bank. At the time I thought it the
most beautiful road I had found in Florida, nor have I seen any great
cause since to alter that opinion. With many pleasant windings
(beautiful roads are never straight, nor unnecessarily wide, which is
perhaps the reason why our rural authorities devote themselves so madly
to the work of straightening and widening),--with many pleasant
windings, I say,

"The grace of God made manifest in curves,"

it follows the edge of the hammock, having the river on one side, and
the forest on the other. It was afternoon when I first saw it. Then it
is shaded from the sun, while the river and its opposite bank have on
them a light more beautiful than can be described or imagined; a
light--with reverence for the poet of nature be it spoken--a light that
never was _except_ on sea or land. The poet's dream was never equal to
it.

In a flat country stretches of water are doubly welcome. They take the
place of hills, and give the eye what it craves,--distance; which
softens angles, conceals details, and heightens colors,--in short,
transfigures the world with its romancer's touch, and blesses us with
illusion. So, as I loitered along the south road, I never tired of
looking across the river to the long, wooded island, and over that to
the line of sand-hills that marked the eastern rim of the East
Peninsula, beyond which was the Atlantic. The white crests of the hills
made the sharper points of the horizon line. Elsewhere clumps of nearer
pine-trees intervened, while here and there a tall palmetto stood, or