barbarous nations from "the populous north"--not the faintest echo had
aroused the slumbering West in the cradle of her existence. Not a thrill
of sympathy had shot across the Atlantic from the heroic adventure, the
intellectual and artistic vitality, the convulsive struggles for
freedom, the calamitous downfalls of empire, and the strange new
regenerations which fill the pages of ancient and mediaeval history.
Alike when the oriental myriads, Assyrian, Chaldean, Median, Persian,
Bactrian, from the snows of Syria to the Gulf of Ormus, from the Halys
to the Indus, poured like a deluge upon Greece and beat themselves to
idle foam on the sea-girt rock of Salamis and the lowly plain of
Marathon; when all the kingdoms of the earth went down with her own
liberties in Rome's imperial maelstrom of blood and fire, and when the
banded powers of the west, beneath the ensign of the cross, as the
pendulum of conquest swung backward, marched in scarcely intermitted
procession for three centuries to the subjugation of Palestine, the
American continent lay undiscovered, lonely and waste. That mighty
action and reaction upon each other of Europe and America, the grand
systole and diastole of the heart of nations, and which now constitutes
so much of the organized life of both, had not yet begun to pulsate.

The unconscious child and heir of the ages lay wrapped in the mantle of
futurity upon the broad and nurturing bosom of divine Providence, and
slumbered serenely like the infant Danae through the storms of fifty
centuries.

THE DARK AGES BEFORE COLUMBUS.

From the writings of SAINT AUGUSTINE, the most noted of the Latin
fathers. Born at Tagasta, Numidia, November 13, A. D. 354; died at
Hippo, August 28, A. D. 430. (This passage was relied on by the
ecclesiastical opponents of Columbus to show the heterodoxy of his
project.)

They do not see that even if the earth were round it would not follow
that the part directly opposite is not covered with water. Besides,
supposing it not to be so, what necessity is there that it should be
inhabited, since the Scriptures, in the first place, the fulfilled
prophecies of which attest the truth thereof for the past, can not be
suspected of telling tales; and, in the second place, it is really too
absurd to say that men could ever cross such an immense ocean to implant
in those parts a sprig of the family of the first man.

THE LEGEND OF COLUMBUS.

JOANNA BA