AN UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. SAMUEL R. ELLIOTT, in the Century Magazine, September, 892. You have no heart? Ah, when the Genoese Before Spain's monarchs his great voyage planned, Small faith had they in worlds beyond the seas— And your Columbus yet may come to land! SAGACITY. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, the well-known American essayist, poet, and speculative philosopher. Born in Boston, May 25, 1803; died at Concord, April 27, 1882. From his essay on 'Success," in Society and Solitude. Copyright, by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers, Boston, and with their permission. Columbus at Veragua found plenty of gold; but, leaving the coast, the ship full of one hundred and fifty skillful seamen, some of them old pilots, and with too much experience of their craft and treachery to him, the wise Admiral kept his private record of his homeward path. And when he reached Spain, he told the King and Queen, "That they may ask all the pilots who came with him, Where is Veragua? Let them answer and say, if they know, where Veragua lies. I assert that they can give no other account than that they went to lands where there was abundance of gold, but they do not know the way to return thither, but would be obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much as if they had never been there before. There is a mode of reckoning," he proudly adds, "derived from astronomy, which is sure and safe to any who understands it." From a poem, THE VOICE OF THE SEA. "Seashore," by RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. 1 with my hammer pounding evermore The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust, Strewing my bed, and, in another age, Then I unbar the doors; my paths lead out Men to all shores that front the hoary main. I too have arts and sorceries; Illusion dwells forever with the wave. I know what spells are laid. Leave me to deal For, though he scoop my water in his palm, THE REASONING OF COLUMBUS. Columbus alleged, as a reason for seeking a continent in the West, that the harmony of nature required a great tract of land in the western hemisphere to balance the known extent of land in the eastern.-Ibid. STRANGER THAN FICTION. EDWARD EVERETT, a distinguished American orator, scholar, and statesman. Born at Dorchester, Mass., April 11, 1794; died, January 15, 1865. From a lecture on "The Discovery of America," delivered at a meeting of the Historical Society of New York in 1853. No chapter of romance equals the interest of this expedition. The most fascinating of the works of fiction which have issued from the modern press have, to my taste, no attraction compared with the pages in which the first voyage of Columbus is described by Robertson, and still more by our own Irving and Prescott, the last two enjoying the advantage over the great Scottish historian of possess ing the lately discovered journals and letters of Columbus himself. The departure from Palos, where a few years before he had begged a morsel of bread and a cup of water for his way-worn child; his final farewell to the Old World at the Canaries; his entrance upon the trade-winds, which then for the first time filled a European sail; the portentous variation of the needle, never before observed; the fearful course westward and westward, day after day and night after night, over the unknown ocean; the mutinous and ill-appeased crew; at length, when hope had turned to despair in every heart but one, the tokens of land-the cloud banks on the western horizon, the logs of driftwood, the fresh shrub floating with its leaves and berries, the flocks of land birds, the shoals of fish that inhabit shallow water, the indescribable smell of the shore; the mysterious presentment that seems ever to go before a great event; and finally, on that ever memorable night of October 12, 1492, the moving light seen by the sleepless eye of the great discoverer himself from the deck of the Santa Maria, and in the morning the real, undoubted land swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains and forests, and hills and rocks and streams, and strange new races of men. These are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our continent exceeds the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines the flickering taper. THE COLUMBUS OF THE HEAVENS-SCORNED. Dominicans may deride thy discoveries now; but the time will come when from two hundred observatories, in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science shall nightly assault the skies; but they shall gain no conquests in those glittering fields before which thine shall be for |