DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY COLUMBUS. 421 



the persecutions which he had to encounter, into a feeling of 

 melancholy and morbid enthusiasm. 



In the heroic ages of the Portuguese and Castilian races it 

 was not thirst for gold alone, as has been asserted from 

 ignorance of the national character at that period, but rather 

 a general spirit of daring, that led to the prosecution of dis- 

 tant voyages. The names of Hayti, Cubagua, and Darien, acted 

 on the imaginations of men in the beginning of the sixteenth 

 century in the same manner as those of Tinian and Otaheite 

 have done in more recent times, since Anson and Cook. If 

 the narrations of far distant lands then drew the youth of the 

 Spanish peninsula, Flanders, Lombardy, and Southern Ger- 

 many, to rally around the victorious standard of an imperial 

 leader on the ridges of the Andes, or the burning plains gf 

 Uraba and Coro, the milder influence of a more modern civi- 

 lisation, when all portions of the earth's surface were more 

 generally accessible, gave other motives and directions to the 

 restless longing for distant travels. A passionate love of the 

 study of nature, which originated chiefly in the north, glowed 

 in the breast of all ; intellectual expansion of views became 

 associated with enlargement of knowledge; whilst the poetic 

 and sentimental tone of feeling, peculiar to the epoch of 

 which we speak, has, since the close of the last century, been 

 identified with literary compositions, whose forms were 

 unknown to former ages. 



On casting a retrospective glance on the great discoveries 

 which prepared the way for this modern tone of feeling, our 

 attention is especially attracted by the descriptions of nature 

 which we owe to the pen of Columbus. It is only recently that 

 we have been in possession of his own ship's journal, his letters 

 to the Chancellor Sanchez, to the Donna Juana de la Torre, 

 governess of the Infant Don Juan, and to Queen Isabella. I 

 have already attempted, in my critical investigation of the 

 history of the geography of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 

 turies,* to show with what depth of feeling for nature the 

 great discoverer was endowed, and how he described the 

 earth and the new heaven opened to his eyes, (viage nuevo al 

 VWPVO cielo i mundo quefasta entonces estaba en occulto,} with 

 a beauty and simplicity of expression which can only be ade- 



* Humboldt, Examen critique de I'histoire de la Geographic du 

 uouveau Continent t. iii. pp. 227-248, 



