Liberal Thought in America 123 



gems and spices to distribute to the merchants of 

 Augsburg, the royal household at Paris, the lords 

 and ladies of Haddon Hall. Empires rose and 

 fell, creeds and pantheons came and went, stately 

 temples reared their heads for centuries and slowly 

 crumbled in ruins, and still amid all the secular 

 change the world's great stream of trade flowed 

 through the same unshifting channels, and there 

 was nothing to show that this state of things, to 

 which men's ideas and habits had always been ad- 

 justed, was not to endure forever. So it was in 

 that recent time when Henry V. of England was 

 smiting the French chivalry at Agincourt, and his 

 cousin Prince Henry of Portugal was beginning 

 the search for an ocean route to the Indies. Never 

 did the human mind get such a wrench out of its 

 ancient grooves, never were such vistas of new pos- 

 sibilities laid open, never was beheld such glorious 

 hardihood, such startling romance, as in the time 

 when Columbus sailed westward to find the East, 

 and Cortes met warriors of the Stone Age face to 

 face. The men of Europe suddenly found them- 

 selves placed in new and unsuspected relations to 

 the planet on which they lived ; worlds of barba- 

 rism and savagery, unheard of and unspeakably 

 bizarre, were brought to their notice ; strange con- 

 stellations arose in the firmament ; strange beasts 



