with immovable resoluteness that the shortest route to the Indies lay across the Atlantic. By the words of Aristotle, received through Averroes, and by letters from Toscanelli, the venerable cosmographer of Florence-who had drawn a map of the world, with Eastern Asia rising over against Europe he was riveted in his faith and lived only in the idea of laying open the western path to the Indies.

After more than ten years of vain solicitations in Portugal, he left the banks of the Tagus to seek aid of Ferdinand and Isabella, rich in nautical experience, having watched the stars at sea from the latitude of Iceland to near the equator at Elmina. Though yet longer baffled by the skepticism which knew not how to comprehend the clearness of his conception, or the mystic trances which sustained his inflexibility of purpose, or the unfailing greatness of his soul, he lost nothing of his devotedness to the sublime office to which he held himself elected from his infancy by the promises of God. When, half resolved to withdraw from Spain, traveling on foot, he knocked at the gate of the monastery of La Rábida, at Palos, to crave the needed charity of food and shelter for himself and his little son, whom he led by the hand, the destitute and neglected seaman, in his naked poverty, was still the promiser of kingdoms, holding firmly in his grasp "the key of the ocean sea;" claiming, as it were from Heaven, the Indies as his own, and "dividing them as he pleased." It was then that through the prior of the convent his holy confidence found support in Isabella, the Queen of Castille; and in 1492, with three poor vessels, of which the largest only was decked, embarking from Palos for the Indies by way of the west, Columbus gave a new world to Castille and Leon, "the like of which was never done by any man in ancient or in later times."

The jubilee of this great discovery is at hand, and now

after the lapse of 400 years, as we look back over the vast ranges of human history, there is nothing in the order of Providence which can compare in interest with the condition of the American continent as it lay upon the surface of the globe, a hemisphere unknown to the rest of the world.

There stretched the iron chain of its mountain barriers, not yet the boundary of political communities; there rolled its mighty rivers unprofitably to the sea; there spread out the measureless, but as yet wasteful, fertility of its uncultivated fields; there towered the gloomy majesty of its unsubdued primeval forests; there glittered in the secret caves of the earth the priceless treasures of its unsunned gold, and, more than all that pertains to material wealth, there existed the undeveloped capacity of 100 embryo states of an imperial confederacy of republics, the future abode of intelligent millions, unrevealed as yet to the "earnest" but unconscious "expectation" of the elder families of man, darkly hidden by the impenetrable veil of waters. There is, to my mind, says Everett, an overwhelming sadness in this long insulation of America from the brotherhood of humanity, not inappropriately reflected in the melancholy expression of the native races.

The boldest keels of Phoenicia and Carthage had not approached its shores. From the footsteps of the ancient nations along the highways of time and fortune-the embattled millions of the old Asiatic despotisms, the iron phalanx of Macedonia, the living, crushing machinery of the Roman legion which ground the world to powder, the heavy tramp of barbarous nations from "the populous north❞—not the faintest echo had aroused the slumbering West in the cradle of her existence. Not a thrill of sympathy had shot across the Atlantic from the heroic adventure, the intellectual and artistic vitality, the convulsive struggles for freedom,

the calamitous downfalls of empire, and the strange new regenerations which fill the pages of ancient and mediæval history. Alike when the oriental myriads, Assyrian, Chaldean, Median, Persian, Bactrian, from the snows of Syria to the Gulf of Ormus, from the Halys to the Indus, poured like a deluge upon Greece and beat themselves to idle foam on the sea-girt rock of Salamis and the lowly plain of Marathon; when all the kingdoms of the earth went down with her own liberties in Rome's imperial maelstrom of blood and fire, and when the banded powers of the west, beneath the ensign of the cross, as the pendulum of conquest swung backward, marched in scarcely intermitted procession for three centuries to the subjugation of Palestine, the American continent lay undiscovered, lonely and waste. That mighty action and reaction upon each other of Europe and America, the grand systole and diastole of the heart of nations, and which now constitutes so much of the organized life of both, had not yet begun to pulsate.

The unconscious child and heir of the ages lay wrapped in the mantle of futurity upon the broad and nurturing bosom of divine Providence, and slumbered serenely like the infant Danae through the storms of fifty centuries.

THE DARK AGES BEFORE COLUMBUS.

From the writings of SAINT AUGUSTINE, the most noted of the Latin fathers. Born at Tagasta, Numidia, November 13, A. D. 354; died at Hippo, August 28, A D. 430. (This passage was relied on by the ecclesiastical opponents of Columbus to show the heterodoxy of his project.)

They do not see that even if the earth were round it would not follow that the part directly opposite is not covered with water. Besides, supposing it not to be so, what necessity is there that it should be inhabited, since the

Scriptures, in the first place, the fulfilled prophecies of which attest the truth thereof for the past, can not be suspected of telling tales; and, in the second place, it is really too absurd to say that men could ever cross such an immense ocean to implant in those parts a sprig of the family of the first man.

THE LEGEND OF COLUMBUS.

JOANNA BAILLIE, a noted Scottish poetess. Born at Bothwell, Scotland, 1762; died at Hampstead, near London, February 23, 1851. From "The Legend of Columbus."

Is there a man that, from some lofty steep,
Views in his wide survey the boundless deep,
When its vast waters, lined with sun and shade,
Wave beyond wave, in serried distance, fade?
COLUMBUS THE CONQUEROR.

No kingly conqueror, since time began
The long career of ages, hath to man

A scope so ample given for trade's bold range.
Or caused on earth's wide stage such rapid,
mighty change.—Ibid.

THE EXAMPLE OF COLUMBUS.

Some ardent youth, perhaps, ere from his home
He launch his venturous bark, will hither come,
Read fondly o'er and o'er his graven name,
With feelings keenly touched, with heart aflame;
Till, wrapped in fancy's wild delusive dream,
Times past and long forgotten, present seem.
To his charmed ear the east wind, rising shrill,
Seems through the hero's shroud to whistle still.
The clock's deep pendulum swinging through the blast
Sounds like the rocking of his lofty mast;

While fitful gusts rave like his clam'rous band,

Mixed with the accents of his high command.
Slowly the stripling quits the pensive scene,
And burns and sighs and weeps to be what he has
been.

Oh, who shall lightly say that fame

Is nothing but an empty name?
Whilst in that sound there is a charm
The nerves to brace, the heart to warm,
As, thinking of the mighty dead,

The young from slothful couch will start,
And vow, with lifted hands outspread,
Like them to act a noble part.

Oh, who shall lightly say that fame
Is nothing but an empty name?
When but for those, our mighty dead,
All ages past a blank would be,
Sunk in oblivion's murky bed,

A desert bare, a shipless sea!
They are the distant objects seen,
The lofty marks of what hath been.-Ibid.

PALOS-THE DEPARTURE.

On Palos' shore, whose crowded strand
Bore priests and nobles of the land,
And rustic hinds and townsmen trim,
And harnessed soldiers stern and grim,
And lowly maids and dames of pride,
And infants by their mother's side-
The boldest seaman stood that e'er
Did bark or ship through tempest steer;
And wise as bold, and good as wise;
The magnet of a thousand eyes,

That on his form and features cast,