of high courage and strong endeavor.
When Columbus, saddened by the frivolousness or the perfidy of courts,
but unshaken in his purpose, walked the streets of the Spanish capital,
lonely and forsaken, the children, as he passed along, would point to
their foreheads and smile, for was not his mind unhinged, and did he not
believe the world was round and on the other side men walked like flies
upon a ceiling? But a woman's heart understood that his folly was of the
kind which is the wisdom of God, and with her help he set sail, not
timidly or doubting like the Portuguese who for fifty years hugged the
African coast, advancing and then receding, but facing the awful and
untraveled ocean with a heart stronger than its storm-swept billows, he
steered due west. In his journal, day after day, he wrote these simple
but sublime words, "That day he sailed westward, which was his course."
And still, as hope rose and fell, as misgivings and terrors seized on
his men, as the compass varied in inexplicable ways as though they were
entering regions where the very laws of Nature change, the soul of the
great admiral stood firm and each evening he wrote again the self-same
words, "that day he sailed westward which was his course," until at
length seeing what he foresaw, he gave to Christendom another world and
enlarged the boundaries and scope of earthly life. What hearts had not
the men who in New England, in Virginia, in Maryland, and elsewhere,
settled in little bands on the edge of vast and unexplored regions,
covered by interminable forests, where savages lay in wait, athirst for
blood. We hear without surprise that wise and prudent men looked upon
the early attempts to take possession of America as not less wild and
visionary than the legendary exploits of Amadis de Gaul; but what
Utopian dreamer, what poet soaring in the high regions of his fancy,
could have imagined two centuries and a half ago the beauty, the power,
the free and majestic sweep of the stream of human life which has poured
across this continent? Who could have dared to hope that the religious
exiles who sought here a home for the Christian conscience were a seed,
the least of all, which was destined to grow into a tree whose boughs
should shelter the land, and bring refreshment to the weary and
heavy-laden from every part of the earth?

Who could have thought that these fugitives from the tyrant's power
would, in little more than a century, grow like the tribes of