The Creole Maiden's Song to the Marvel of Peru, by Richard Hill
A fondness for flowers is characteristic of the coloured Creoles of the Spanish colonies. On holidays, the groups of young people who seek in the evening the savannahs for recreation, among other devices for pastime employ themselves in weaving garlands and singing improvisatore songs. When in Haiti, I never visited the savannahs of St. Jago de los Cavalleros, on such occasions, without observing, in the sort of natural bowers with which the lawns are interspersed, some company of young persons gathered together, and amusing themselves in this way. In addition to this characteristic affection for the blossoms of the field and the forest, the Hispaniolian females make use of natural flowers, (particularly those that expand in the evening,) as ornaments for the head. The assertion made by persons who have visited those colonies, that these chaplets are not unfrequently intermingled with fire-flies confined in gauze bandages as a substitute for brilliants, is not to be charged as a traveller's tale. The following little effusion is an attempt to embody some of these traits, in the supposed chant of a Hispaniolian or Haitian girl, sent to gather a garland for her sister, but who purposely spares the night-blooming Marvel of Peru, a plant whose pretty, rough, oval seeds, supplying children with materials for necklaces, is particularly cherished by them.
Wake up from thy sunset bower,
Spread thy leaves my pretty flower;
Spread thy leaves, unclose thine eyes,
For the silver moon doth rise,
And the golden stars are coming,
And the beetle's at his humming,
And the moth is from his bed,
And the cricket from his shed,
And the fire-fly comes to roam,
With his lanthorn-light from home,
Briskly wandering here and there,
Up and down and every where,
Whispering to each flower he sees,
What a night, without a breeze!