COLUMBUS. 53 



an accurate acquaintance with the poets of ancient and 

 modern times ; that given by Columbus of the mild sky of 

 Paria, and of the abundant waters of the Orinoco, flowing 

 as he imagines from the east of Paradise, is marked by an 

 earnestly religious tone of mind, which afterwards, by the 

 influence of increasing years, and of the unjust persecutions 

 which he encountered, became touched with melancholy, and 

 with a vein of morbid enthusiasm. 



In the heroic times of the Portuguese and Castilian 

 races, it was not the thirst of gold alone (as has been 

 asserted, in ignorance of the national character of the period), 

 but rather a general excitement which led so many to 

 dare the hazards of distant voyages. In the beginning of 

 the sixteenth century, the names of Hayti, Cubagua, and 

 Darien, acted on the imagination of men as in more recent 

 times, since Anson and Cook, those of Tinian and Tahiti 

 have done. If the tidings of far distant lands then drew 

 the youth of the Iberian peninsula, of Flanders, Milan, and 

 Southern Germany, under the victorious banners of the 

 great Emperor, to the ridges of the Andes and to the 

 burning plains of Uraba and Coro ; in more modern times, 

 under the milder influence of a later cultivation, and as the 

 earth's surface became more generally accessible in all its 

 parts, the restless longing for distant regions acquired 

 fresh motives and a new direction. The passionate love for 

 the study of nature which proceeded chiefly from the north, 

 inflamed the minds of men ; intellectual grandeur of view 

 became associated with the enlargement of material know- 

 ledge ; and the particular poetic sentimental turn belonging 

 to the period, has embodied itself, since the close of the last 

 century, in literary works under forms which were before 



