Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before.  He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.  The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

  “And now the sun had stretched out all the
        hills,
  And now was dropped into the western bay;
  At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
  To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is?  Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.”  Later botanists more than confirm his observations.  Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described.  The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther,—­farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says,—­“As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World ....  The man of the Old World sets out upon his way.  Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe.  Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development.  Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.”  When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.”  So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times.  The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “’From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX.  From the East light; from the West fruit.