The traveller, at least so I think, would remark also, with some surprise, the seeming smallness of these islands.  The Basse Terre of Guadaloupe, for instance, is forty miles in length.  As you lie off it, it does not look half, or even a quarter, of that length; and that, not merely because the distances north and south are foreshortened, or shut in by nearer headlands.  The causes, I believe, are more subtle and more complex.  First, the novel clearness of the air, which makes the traveller, fresh from misty England, fancy every object far nearer, and therefore far smaller, than it actually is.  Next the simplicity of form.  Each outer line trends upward so surely toward a single focus; each whole is so sharply defined between its base-line of sea and its background of sky, that, like a statue, each island is compact and complete in itself, an isolated and self-dependent organism; and therefore, like every beautiful statue, it looks much smaller than it is.  So perfect this isolation seems, that one fancies, at moments, that the island does not rise out of the sea, but floats upon it; that it is held in place, not by the roots of the mountains, and deep miles of lava-wall below, but by the cloud which has caught it by the top, and will not let it go.  Let that cloud but rise, and vanish, and the whole beautiful thing will be cast adrift; ready to fetch way before the wind, and (as it will seem often enough to do when viewed through a cabin-port) to slide silently past you, while you are sliding past it.

And yet, to him who knows the past, a dark shadow hangs over all this beauty; and the air—­even in clearest blaze of sunshine—­is full of ghosts.  I do not speak of the shadow of negro slavery, nor of the shadow which, though abolished, it has left behind, not to be cleared off for generations to come.  I speak of the shadow of war, and the ghosts of gallant soldiers and sailors.  Truly here

’The spirits of our fathers
   Might start from every wave;
For the deck it was their field of fame,
   And ocean was their grave,’

and ask us:  What have you done with these islands, which we won for you with precious blood?  What could we answer?  We have misused them, neglected them; till now, ashamed of the slavery of the past, and too ignorant and helpless to govern them now slavery is gone, we are half-minded to throw them away again, or to allow them to annex themselves, in sheer weariness at our imbecility, to the Americans, who, far too wise to throw them away in their turn, will accept them gladly as an instalment of that great development of their empire, when ‘The stars and stripes shall float upon Cape Horn.’

But was it for this that these islands were taken and retaken, till every gully held the skeleton of an Englishman?  Was it for this that these seas were reddened with blood year after year, till the sharks learnt to gather to a sea-fight, as eagle, kite, and wolf gathered of old to fights on land?  Did all those gallant souls go down to Hades in vain, and leave nothing for the Englishman but the sad and proud memory of their useless valour?  That at least they have left.