him were the tempest and the storm? The sea was his home;
a wave-tossed ship was but a rocking - cradle; the oceans roar
a happy cradle song. He loved the sea.
And loving it, he wondered what lay beyond the horizon
—beyond the realm where men had dared explore. He won
dered. And as he wondered he dreamed. If men could not
answer him, nature and his fancy could. lie dreamed. And
what pictures of fancy they were, painted on the fabric of a
thousand slender facts, outlined by the theories of the bold
est adventurers, and tinted and perfected by his own person
ality. These were the dreams that became realities—
magnilicient realities which needed no proving to him,
Christopher Columbus.
Here then was the opportunity of ages; here the man
who saw it. Here was a test for the mettle of a man; here
a man who dared to try it.
He saw an opportunity. What was it? Vast and grand
as the New World is, yet through all historic ages it had
been unknown to the old. For the Egyptian legend, narrated
by PlatQ, concerning the “Islands of Atlantis,” had been at
best but a fable. And tho’ it is not impossible that in some
time, “beyond the reach of either history or tradition, —when,
as some imagine, the arts may have flourished in a degree
unknown.—there existed an intercourse between the shores
ol the Atlantic,” but if so, then all such knowledge had been
lost even to the Ancients. And so as the people of Europe
stood upon its shores gazing to westward, they were filled
with awe and terror at the vast waters of the ocean, “which
seemed to bound the world as with a chaos, into which con
jecture could not penetrate and enterprise feared to adven
ture. ” For imagination had pictured it as a region of death,
Where the waves rolled high,
And the clouds rolled low;
Where wave followed fast on wave,
And underneath was the undertow,'
And underneath the grave.