DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY COLUMBUS. 65 



highly-gifted writers, even for centuries afterward, so, in like 

 manner, did the discovery of America act in exercising a sec- 

 ond and stronger influence on the western nations than that 

 of the crusades. The tropical world, with all the luxuriance 

 of its vegetation on the plains, with all the gradations of its 

 varied organisms on the declivities of the Cordilleras, and 

 with all the reminiscences of northern climates associated with 

 the inhabited plateaux of Mexico, New Granada, and QuitOj 

 was now first revealed to the eyes of Europeans. Fa.ncy, 

 without whose aid no truly great work can succeed in the 

 hands of man, lent a peculiar charm to the delineations of na- 

 ture sketched by Columbus and Vespucci. The first of these 

 discoverers is distinguished for his deep and earnest sentiment 

 of religion, as we find exemplified in his description of the 

 mild sky of Paria, and of the mass of water of the Orinoco, 

 which he believed to flow from the eastern paradise, while 

 the second is remarkable for the intimate acquaintance he 

 evinces with the poets of ancient and modern times, as shown 

 in his description of the Brazilian coast. The religious senti- 

 ment thus early evinced by Columbus became converted, with 

 increasing years, and under the influence of the persecutions 

 *v rxjch he had to encounter, into a feeling of melancholy and 

 r.ofbid enthusiasm. 



in the heroic ages of the Portuguese and Castilian races, 

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

 norance of the national character at that period, but rather a 

 general spirit of daring, that led to the prosecution oi distant 

 voyages. The names of Hayti, Cubaj^ua, and Darien acted 

 on the imaginations of men in the beginning of the s:ixteenth 

 century in the same manner as those of Tinian and Otaheite 

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

 the narrations of far-distant lands then drew the youtn 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 of 

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

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

 generally accessible, gave other motives and directions to tha 

 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 beca.me 

 associated with enlargement of knowledge ; while tiie pontic 

 and sentimental tone of feeling, peculiar to the epoch of wh'ch 

 we speak, has, since the close of the last century, been ident** 



