and scorn, this intrepid soul, inspired by a great
and original idea, wandered from city to city, and
country to country, and court to court, to present
the certain greatness and wealth of any state that
would embark in his enterprise. But all were
alike cynical, cold, unbelieving, and even insulting.
He opposes overwhelming, universal, and overpowering
ideas. To have surmounted these amid such protracted
opposition and discouragement constitutes his greatness;
and finally to prove his position by absolute experiment
and hazardous enterprise makes him one of the greatest
of human benefactors, whose fame will last through
all the generations of men. And as I survey that
lonely, abstracted, disappointed, and derided man,—poor
and unimportant, so harassed by debt that his creditors
seized even his maps and charts, obliged to fly from
one country to another to escape imprisonment, without
even listeners and still less friends, and yet with
ever-increasing faith in his cause, utterly unconquerable,
alone in opposition to all the world,—I
think I see the most persistent man of enterprise that
I have read of in history. Critics ambitious
to say something new may rake out slanders from the
archives of enemies, and discover faults which derogate
from the character we have been taught to admire and
venerate; they may even point out spots, which we
cannot disprove, in that sun of glorious brightness,
which shed its beneficent rays over a century of darkness,—but
this we know, that, whatever may be the force of detraction,
his fame has been steadily increasing, even on the
admission of his slanderers, for three centuries,
and that he now shines as a fixed star in the constellation
of the great lights of modern times, not alone because
he succeeded in crossing the ocean, when once embarked
on it, but for surmounting the moral difficulties
which lay in his way before he could embark upon it,
and for being finally instrumental in conferring the
greatest boon that our world has received from any
mortal man, since Noah entered into the ark.
I think it is Lamartine who has said that truly immortal
benefactors have seldom been able to accomplish their
mission without the encouragement of either saints
or women. This is emphatically true in the case
of Columbus. The door to success was at last opened
to him by a friendly and sympathetic friar of a Franciscan
convent near the little port of Palos, in Andalusia.
The sun-burned and disappointed adventurer (for that
is what he was), wearied and hungry, and nearly discouraged,
stopped at the convent-door to get a morsel of bread
for his famished son, who attended him in his pilgrimage.
The prior of that obscure convent was the first who
comprehended the man of genius, not so much because
he was an enlightened scholar, but because his pious
soul was full of kindly sympathy, showing that the
instincts of love are kindred to the inspirations
of genius. It was the voice of Ali and Cadijeh
that strengthened Mohammed. It was Catherine