304 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
Columbus, with his little fleet of three vessels, solved the prob- 
lem of the ages, dispelled the deep and profound mystery, and 
bridged the dark and unfathomable abyss. Landing upon the 
Bahamas, he impregnated the newly found Western world with 
the seminal principles of the old Eastern civilization. This clus- 
ter of keys and islands constitute the cradle in which Young 
America, with all his inventions and revolutionary ideas in em- 
bryo, was first rocked. How murky were the shadows that four 
centuries ago shrouded equally the Christian church and the most 
famous institutions of learning! Out of them the tall and com- 
manding form of Columbus rises, radiant with an effulgence that 
seems divine, ennobled and glorified by great truths in advance 
of hisage. Foreighteen long years he bore with marvelous forti- 
tude and equanimity the unsupplied and pressing wants which 
his poverty engendered, the delusive and broken promises of 
kings, the mistaken fears and bigotry of the good, the narrow- 
mindedness of the learned, and the ridicule and contempt, the 
scoffs and jeers of the ignorant and doubting world. 
The lesson of Columbus should never be forgotten by the emi- 
nent theologians and divines who minister at the altars of religion, 
and guard its profound mysteries in their small but sacred arks; 
nor by the votaries of science, who seem, while they explore the 
wonderful phenomena of nature, as disclosed upon our earth, or 
travel among the stars, to literally ‘‘ walk with God.” Let them 
ever remember that outside of cloistered cells and institutions 
richly endowed and furnished, in the future asin the past, the 
most valuable germs of progress will probably be found; that no 
proposition should be ignored because it is bold and startling; no 
truth ostracised because it is new. At the same time it may be 
well for some of the long haired, unshaved, and unkempt seers 
of our day, who. have, as they think, some great revolutionary 
and reformatory mission to fulfill, to consider that it may not be 
