HARPER’S
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
VOLUME CXXXIV
DECEMBER, 1916, TO MAY, 1917
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
A Confession of St. Augustine
BY W. D. HOWELLS
| Part I Part II |
PART I
HEN we drove from the station up into the town, in the March of ourfirst sojourn, and saw the palmettoes all along the streets, among thedim live-oaks and the shining magnolias, our doubting hearts lifted, andwe said: “Yes, yes, it is all true! This is St. Augustine as advertised:the air, the sky, the wooden architecture of the 1870’s and ’80’s, whenSt. Augustine flourished most, and the memory of that dear ConstanceFenimore Woolson, who worshiped Florida past all Italy, was still sweetin our literature. Yes, it is all incredibly true!” Then, as we made ourway to Mr. Hastings’s beautiful masterpieces, the hotels Ponce de Leonand Alcazar, and took refuge in the Neo-Andalusian of the simplerhostelry from the Belated American of those obsolescent cottages, wegathered our faith and courage more and more about us, and gaveourselves to that charm of the place which has not yet failed us.
The charm is very complex, as a true charm always is, but the place isvery simple, as a place which has taken time to grow always is. It isespecially so if the place, like St. Augustine, has had its period ofwaning as well as waxing, and has gently lapsed from its climax. Theheydey of its prosperity was in the years between the 1870’s and ’80’s,when St. Augustine promised to be lastingly, as it was most fitly, thewinter resort for the whole sneezing and coughing North. Then the GreatFreeze blasted the oranges and hopes of all Upper Florida; thenCalifornia flowered and fruited ahead; then the summer shores of PalmBeach and Miami took the primacy from California, and Florida was againthe desire of our winter travel and sojourn, with a glory of motoringand dancing such as Florida never knew before, or can ever know, at St.Augustine. But the little city continued the metropolis of the mind andheart for such as did not care to shine with the luster of money; andthose beautiful hotels remained without rivalry from the vast woodencaravansaries of the more tropical resorts, and still remain holdingdown their quarter of the local topography.
It is better, though, to own at once that the charm of St. Augustinederives nothing from any thing like grandeur in the domesticarchitecture of the past. In the Spanish city there were probably nodwellings of such stateliness as the three or four mansions of our ownColonial classic, which with their groves and gardens redeem theAmerican town from the reproach of those deplorable ’seventies and’eighties, when our eclectic architecture tried its ’prentice hand on somany of the cottages. The Spaniards had built themselves unassuminghouses of coquina, always flush upon the sidewalks, and painted theircoating of stucco in the