et our
illustration be the case of Columbus, who, from the figure of the earth,
inferred that there must be a way of arriving at the Indies by a voyage
directly west, in distinction from the very complicated way hitherto
practiced, by sailing up the Mediterranean, crossing the isthmus of
Suez, and so falling down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. He weighed
all the circumstances attendant on such an undertaking in his mind.
He enquired into his own powers and resources, imaged to himself
the various obstacles that might thwart his undertaking, and finally
resolved to engage in it. If Columbus had not entertained a very good
opinion of himself, it is impossible that he should have announced such
a project, or should have achieved it.

Again. Let our illustration be, of Homer undertaking to compose the
Iliad. If he had not believed himself to be a man of very superior
powers to the majority of the persons around him, he would most
assuredly never have attempted it. What an enterprise! To describe in
twenty-four books, and sixteen thousand verses, the perpetual warfare
and contention of two great nations, all Greece being armed for the
attack, and all the western division of Asia Minor for the defence: the
war carried on by two vast confederacies, under numerous chiefs, all
sovereign and essentially independent of each other. To conceive the
various characters of the different leaders, and their mutual rivalship.
To engage all heaven, such as it was then understood, as well as what
was most respectable on earth, in the struggle. To form the idea,
through twenty-four books, of varying the incidents perpetually, and
keeping alive the attention of the reader or hearer without satiety or
weariness. For this purpose, and to answer to his conception of a great
poem, Homer appears to have thought it necessary that the action should
be one; and he therefore took the incidental quarrel of Achilles and
the commander in chief, the resentment of Achilles, and his consequent
defection from the cause, till, by the death of Patroclus, and then
of Hector, all traces of the misunderstanding first, and then of its
consequences, should be fully obliterated.

There is further an essential difference between the undertaking of
Columbus and that of Homer. Once fairly engaged, there was for Columbus
no drawing back. Being already at sea on the great Atlantic Ocean, he
could not retrace his steps. Even when he had presented his project to
the