Haytian Correspondence.--No. I.

Friends Douglass and Delany:ーHaving proceeded thus far on my pilgrimage, I hasten to set about a correspondence, the commencement of which has already been too long deferred. This should not have happened, had it not been for the many seductions which the great commercial and fashionable metropolis of my native country threw around me. Great, very great, indeed, was the pleasure attendant upon my sojourn in the city of New Yorkーa pleasure which was traceable not merely to the contemplation of its gorgeous and stately edifices, or to the daily wanderings I indulged in along its magnificent Broadwayーthat unrivalled queen of thoroughfaresーand her scarcely less princely sisters, animated with the bustle and activity of business-life, and glittering with every manifestation of beauty and of taste. All this, though sufficiently alluring in itself, was only the petalled splendor of the rose, enclosing a perfume, the fragrance of which rendered the lovely conformation of the flower but a matter of secondary consideration. I found there many kind and warm-hearted friends, who shall ever live in my memory, and the recollection of whose courtesies, so freely extended to the stranger, shall ever cheer the various phases of my uncertain future. Most fully shall I always appreciate their efforts to make my two months' stay in their midst a delightful one; and so successful were they therein, that I took my leave of New York as though I were departing from a second home, filled with regrets that I could not render their abiding place the termination of my wanderings.

Not the least of these regrets was, that I could not remain yet a day longer, in order that I might be able to attend a meeting of colored citizens, to testify their regard for the character, and sorrow for the loss of the Sage of Quincy. Truly, that great and good man, who had spent more than half a century in the service of his country, whose head had been whitened by the frosts of eighty winters, and who had never suffered one moment of his long life to aid in the advancement of oppression, merited well such a manifestation of respect. But he has gone to take.

"His chamber in the silent halls of death;"

and highly momentous is the question, upon whose shoulders has his mantle fallen? Alas! in the insults heaped upon sister states, in the sanguinary war waged against a sister republic, and in the fierce efforts made to crush every measure that would tend to restrain slavery within its present limits, we may readily deem we read that the service once so heartfully rendered to the spirit of liberty, exists no longer save in name, and that new altars have been erected, lurid with strange fire, and officiated at by an order of priesthood, which the martyred heroes of the revolution would disdain to recognize as their offspring. The departed statesman was one of the very few remaining links which connected the present with the past—the epoch in which the rhetoric of the schools, the polished acumen of the legislator, and the genius of diplomacy, refined by the experience of age, are all prostituted in the service of oppression, with that one in which the honest country gentleman left his plough-share to rest in the furrow, and the artisan suffered the instruments of his craft to lie idle on the bench, while they hastened, with hearts on fire with patriotism, and lips burning with eloquence, to pledge their all in the sacred cause of freedom. And among the proudest honors that will always shed a glorious halo around the memory of John Quincy Adams, is, that he was ever found an Abdiel amid the faithless; and that, in the midst of the degeneracy that everywhere surrounded him, he never forgot the lessons taught him in the school of his early training, nor ever faltered from the faith and spirit inherited from his revolutionary sire.

We sailed from New York in the brig Hayti, on the 2d inst., and getting fairly to sea on the 3d, arrived here after quite a pleasant run of twelve days, on the 15th. On the morning of the day previous to that of my arrival, I was aroused by the gratifying announcement that Cape St. Nicholas, the North-western point of the island, was in sight. It would be impossible for me to describe the rapture with which I beheld for the first time, this land, unpolluted by the foul stain of slavery, and upon which the insults and the cruelties of the tyrant had been washed out in the blood of himself and his children. During almost the entire day, I remained lost in silent contemplation of those magnificent head-lands ー Nature's own bulwarks, thrown up to hurl back the invader from this soil of freedom. As the day drew to its close, the scene was truly a most beautiful one. In the midst of these promitories, clad in the bright verdure of this region of perpetual summer, appeared a vast pile of limestone, known by the name of the Platform, and which, viewed from a distance, assumes the appearance of an enormous fortress. From its mimic parapetsーthanks to a passing shower ー there floated, apparently, like flaunting standards, two gorgeous rainbows, throwing triumphal arches athwart the course of our little vessel. Nor was the scene less imposing in the opposite quarter of the horizon,

"Where, like a routed king, the sultan sun

Still struggled on the fiery verge of heaven,"

pouring upon the intervening expanse of waters the last treasures of his fading glory, until it flowed an ocean of mingled gold and azure. It was a spectacle that 'twere pity for any night to close over, save a moon-lit eve of the tropics, with its bright blue skies, and its stars sparkling with a radiance that is denied to those which glisten in the firmament of our more northern clime.

On the following day, we entered the lovely bay of Port au Prince, which, with its clear waters calmly shining in their hill-girt basin, and its beautiful Arcadins and other islets resting upon its bosom, like emerald clasps upon vestments of azure, can well challenge comparison with the far-famed one of Naples. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon, we came to anchor in the harbor, which I was rejoiced to find filled with the shipping of many lands. After a short detention consequent upon a visit from the officers of the custom-house[,] I went ashore in company with Captain Cutts, the gentlemanly master of the Hayti, and was introduced to a number of gentlemen resident in the place. I found the wharves alive with all the stir of flourishing commerce, and my ears were almost deafened with the wild and discordant Babel produced by a thousand tongues, each rattling away fluently in the French language, or its corruptions, the Creole. Everything around me wore the aspect of novelty. The strange appearance of the housesーthe manner and habits of the people, so different from those to which a resident of the United States has been accustomed, that they obtrude themselves, on the instant, upon his attentionーthe soldiers on guard at the Port, or loitering at the corners, all bearing a skin, the color of which, at home, would subject them to insult and degradationーall these, and a thousand other things, told me plainly that I was no longer in the land of my birthーof all that had grown precious to me by the endearing ties of association. Yet I have found here several American friends and former associates of those who are dear to me, so that after six days have elapsed, I find myself still amused with the novelty of my situation, and withal contented.

In a short timeーthat is, when I have been here sufficiently long to render you something like an impartial account of matters and things so exceedingly novel, I will write again. Until then, adieu.

HAROLD.