ing on foot, he knocked at the gate of the monastery of La
Rabida, at Palos, to crave the needed charity of food and shelter for
himself and his little son, whom he led by the hand, the destitute and
neglected seaman, in his naked poverty, was still the promiser of
kingdoms, holding firmly in his grasp "the key of the ocean sea;"
claiming, as it were from Heaven, the Indies as his own, and "dividing
them as he pleased." It was then that through the prior of the convent
his holy confidence found support in Isabella, the Queen of Castille;
and in 1492, with three poor vessels, of which the largest only was
decked, embarking from Palos for the Indies by way of the west, Columbus
gave a new world to Castille and Leon, "the like of which was never done
by any man in ancient or in later times."

The jubilee of this great discovery is at hand, and now after the lapse
of 400 years, as we look back over the vast ranges of human history,
there is nothing in the order of Providence which can compare in
interest with the condition of the American continent as it lay upon the
surface of the globe, a hemisphere unknown to the rest of the world.

There stretched the iron chain of its mountain barriers, not yet the
boundary of political communities; there rolled its mighty rivers
unprofitably to the sea; there spread out the measureless, but as yet
wasteful, fertility of its uncultivated fields; there towered the gloomy
majesty of its unsubdued primeval forests; there glittered in the secret
caves of the earth the priceless treasures of its unsunned gold, and,
more than all that pertains to material wealth, there existed the
undeveloped capacity of 100 embryo states of an imperial confederacy of
republics, the future abode of intelligent millions, unrevealed as yet
to the "earnest" but unconscious "expectation" of the elder families of
man, darkly hidden by the impenetrable veil of waters. There is, to my
mind, says Everett, an overwhelming sadness in this long insulation of
America from the brotherhood of humanity, not inappropriately reflected
in the melancholy expression of the native races.

The boldest keels of Phoenicia and Carthage had not approached its
shores. From the footsteps of the ancient nations along the highways of
time and fortune--the embattled millions of the old Asiatic despotisms,
the iron phalanx of Macedonia, the living, crushing machinery of the
Roman legion which ground the world to powder, the heavy tramp of