and although the touch of time has effaced the lettering of his name, it is powerless, and cannot destroy the fruits of his victory.

It

THE poetical temperament of Columbus is discernible throughout all his writings, and in all his actions. spread a golden and glorious world around him, and tinged everything with its own gorgeous colors. It betrayed him 5 into visionary speculations, which subjected him to the sneers and cavillings of men of cooler and safer but more grovelling minds.

Such were the conjectures formed on the coast of Paria, about the form of the earth, and the situation of the ter10 restrial paradise; about the mines of Ophir, in Hispaniola,. and of the Aurea Chersonesus, in Veragua; and such was the heroic scheme of the crusade for the recovery of the holy sepulchre. It mingled with his religion, and filled his mind with solemn and visionary meditations on mystic 15 passages of the scriptures, and the shadowy portents of the prophecies. It exalted his office in his eyes, and made him conceive himself an agent sent forth upon a sublime and awful mission, subject to impulses and supernatural visions from the Deity; such as the voice he imagined 20 spoke to him in comfort, amidst the troubles of Hispaniola, and in the silence of the night, on the disastrous coast of Veragua.

He was decidedly a visionary, but a visionary of an uncommon and successful kind. The manner in which his 25 ardent imagination and mercurial nature were controlled

by a powerful judgment, and directed by an acute sagacity, is the most extraordinary feature in his character. Thus governed, his imagination, instead of wasting itself in idle

soarings, lent wings to his judgment, and bore it away to conclusions at which common minds could never have arrived; nay, which they could not perceive when pointed out.

To his intellectual vision it was given, to read in the 5 signs of the times, and in the reveries of past ages, the indications of an unknown world, as soothsayers were said to read predictions in the stars, and to foretell events from the visions of the night. "His soul," observes a Spanish writer, "was superior to the age in which he lived. For 10 him was reserved the great enterprise to plough a sea which had given rise to so many fables, and to decipher the mystery of his time.”

With all the visionary fervor of his imagination, its fondest dreams fell short of the reality. He died in 15 ignorance of the real grandeur of his discovery. Until his last breath, he entertained the idea that he had merely opened a new way to the old resorts of opulent commerce, and had discovered some of the wild regions of the East. He supposed Hispaniola to be the ancient Ophir, 20 which had been visited by the ships of Solomon, and that Cuba and Terra Firma were but remote parts of Asia. What visions of glory would have broken upon his mind, could he have known that he had indeed discovered a new continent, equal to the whole of the old world in magni25 tude, and separated by two vast oceans from all the earth hitherto known by civilized man! and how would his magnanimous spirit have been consoled, amidst the chills of age, and the cares of penury, the neglect of a fickle public, and the injustice of an ungrateful king, could he have an30 ticipated the splendid empires which were to spread over

the beautiful world he had discovered, and the nations and tongues and languages which were to fill its lands with his renown, and to revere and bless his name to the latest posterity!

CXXVI.

APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN.

BYRON.

1 THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

2 Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain,
Man marks the earth with ruin his control
Stops with the shore; - upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

3 The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals;
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee~·
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, — what are they?

5

Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou,

Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play-
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed-in breeze or gale or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime — The image of Eternity-the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

6 And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers- they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror, - 't was a pleasing fear;
For I was, as it were, a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane

as I do here.

CXXVII. SUMMER.

MITCHELL.

[DONALD G. MITCHELL is an American author, a graduate of Yale College, of the class of 1841, who, under the assumed name of "Ike Marvel," has written "The Battle Summer in Europe," "Reveries of a Bachelor," and "Dream Life." His prose is graphic and musical; poetical in spirit, and characterized by purity, as well as tenderness, of feeling. This extract is from "Dream Life."}

summer's day of

my

life that my

I THANK heaven every lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks. And from all the tramp

and bustle of the world, into which fortune has led me in 5 these latter years of my life, I delight to steal away for days

and for weeks together, and bathe my spirit in the freedom of the old woods, and to grow young again lying upon the brook-side, and counting the white clouds that sail along the sky, softly and tranquilly — even as holy memo10 ries go stealing over the vault of life.

Two days since I was sweltering in the heat of the city, jostled by the thousand eager workers, and panting under the shadow of the walls. But I have stolen away; and, for two hours of healthful regrowth into the darling past, 15 I have been lying, this blessed summer's morning, upon the grassy bank of a stream that babbled me to sleep in boyhood. Dear old stream, unchanging, unfaltering, with no harsher notes now than then, - never growing old, smiling in your silver rustle, and calming your20 self in the broad, placid pools; I love you as I love a friend.

But now that the sun has grown scalding hot, and the waves of heat have come rocking under the shadow of the meadow oaks, I have sought shelter in a chamber of the 25 old farm-house. The window-blinds are closed; but some of them are sadly shattered, and I have intertwined in them a few branches of the late blossoming white azalia, so that every puff of the summer air comes to me cooled with fragrance. A dimple or two of the sunlight still 30 steals through my flowery screen, and dances, as the breeze moves the branches, upon the oaken floor of the farm-house.

Through one little gap, indeed, I can see the broad stretch of meadow, and the workmen in the field bending 35 and swaying to their scythes. I can see, too, the glistening of the steel, as they wipe their blades; and can just