True, all is 'still- life' here: no human forms, hardly even that of a bird, is mixed with the vegetable arabesques.

A higher state of civilisation, ages after we are dead, may introduce them, and complete the scene by peopling it with a race worthy of it.

But the Creator, at least, has done His part toward producing perfect beauty, all the more beautiful from its contrast with the ugliness outside.

For the want of human beings fit for all that beauty, man is alone to blame; and when we saw approach us, as the only priest of such a temple, a wild brown man, who feeds his hogs on Moriche fruit and Mombin plums, and whose only object was to sell us an ant-eater's skin, we thought to ourselves--knowing the sad history of the West Indies--what might this place have become, during the three hundred and fifty years which have elapsed since Columbus first sailed round it, had men-- calling themselves Christian, calling themselves civilised-- possessed any tincture of real Christianity, of real civilisation?
What a race, of mingled Spaniard and Indian, might have grown up throughout the West Indies.

What a life, what a society, what an art, what a science it might have developed ere now, equalling, even surpassing, that of Ionia, Athens, and Sicily, till the famed isles and coasts of Greece should have been almost forgotten in the new fame of the isles and coasts of the Caribbean Sea.
What might not have happened, had men but tried to copy their Father in heaven?
What has happened is but too well known, since, in July 1498, Columbus, coming hither, fancied (and not so wrongly) that he had come to the 'base of the Earthly Paradise.' What might not have been made, with something of justice and mercy, common sense and humanity, of these gentle Arawaks and Guaraons.