INTRODUCTION. Far o'er yon azure main thy view extend, TIMOTHY DWIGHT. VERY nation eminent for its refinement, displayed in the cultivation of the arts, had its heroic age; a period when its first physical and moral conquests were achieved, and when rude society, with al! its impurities, was fused and refined in the crucible of progress. When civilization first set up its standard as a permanent ensign in the Western hemisphere, northward of the Bahamas and the great Gulf, and the contests for possession began between the wild. Aborigines, who thrust no spade harvests, and those earnest delvers from the Old World, who came with the light of Christianity to plant a new empire and redeem the wilderness by cultivation, then commenced the heroic age of America. It ended when the work of the Revolution, in the eighteenth century, was accomplished; when the bond of vassalage to Great Britain was severed by her colonies, and when the thirteen confederated States ratified a federal Constitution, and upon it laid the broad foundation of our Republic. Those ancient civilizations, registered by the stylus of history, were mere gleamings of morning compared with the noontide radiance which now lights up the Western World ; and even the more modern nations of Europe, brilliant as they appear, have so many dark spots upon the disk of their enlightenment, that their true glory is really less than that of the waxing Star in the West. These ancient and modern civilizations, now past or at their culminating points, were the results of the slow progress of centuries; the heroic age of America, meteor-like, was brilliant and rapid in its course, occupying the space of only a century and a half of time from the permanent implanting of a British colony, weak and dependent, to the founding of our government, which, like Pallas Athena, was, at its birth, full panoplied, strong, eminently individual in its character, and full of recuperative energies. The head of Britannia was cleft by the Vulcan of the Revolution, and from its teeming brain leaped the full-grown daughter, sturdy and defiant. 1521. Long anterior to the advent of Europeans in America, a native empire, but little inferior to Old Rome in civilization, flourished in that region of our continent which now forms the southwestern portion of the Republic. The Aztec empire, which reached the acme of its refinement during the reign of Montezuma, and crumbled into fragments when Cortez dethroned and murdered that monarch, extended over the whole of Central America; and when the Spaniards came it was gradually pushing its conquests northward, where all was yet darkness and gloom. To human apprehension, this people, apparently allied by various ties to the wild nations of North America, appeared to be the most efficient instruments in spreading the light of civilization over the whole continent; yet they were not only denied this glorious privilege, but, by the very race which first attempted to plant the seeds of European refinement in Florida and among the Mobilian tribes, and to shed the illumination of their dim Christianity over the dreary regions of the North, was their own bright light extinguished. The Aztecs and their neighbors were beaten into the dust of debasement by the falchion blows of avarice and bigotry, and they form, apparently, not the most insignificant atom of the chain of events which connects the history of the empires of the Old World with that of our Republic. It is believed that, two hundred years before the Aztecs subdued the more ancient people of the Mexican valley and founded Tenochtitlan,' a handful of rough, half-civilized adventurers from the wintery shores of Iceland and the neighboring main, driven by adverse winds they knew not whither, touched upon the bleak shores of Labrador, and traversed the American continent southward as far as Rhode Island, and, it may be, the capes of Virginia." These supposed first modern discoverers of America were the children of the "mighty sea kings" of the Teutonic romances-the Scandinavian reguli, who, scorning to own Gorm the Old of Norway, and Harold Fairhair of Denmark, their conquerors, as masters, forsook their country and colonized Iceland, Greenland, Shetland, and the Orkney Islands, whence they sent forth piratical expeditions, which became a terror to Western Europe. They traded as well as plundered, and by commerce and conquest became potential. Every coast was visited by their squadrons, either for war or traffic. They swept over Denmark and Germany, and by conquest obtained possession of the best portions of Gaul. They invaded the British Islands, and placed the renowned Canute upon the throne of Alfred. Long before Christianity had shed its genial rays over their frozen territory of the North, and banished the barbarous rites of Pagan worship, the lamp of learning had been 1014. 1 This city was founded about the year 1210, and was afterward called Mexico, which signifies the place of Mexitli, the Aztec god of war. The present capital of Mexico is upon the site of that ancient city. The Aztecs, at that time, were settled in Lower California. They were divided into six tribes. The Mexican tribe wandered off southward, subdued the Toltecs, and founded the city around which the whole Aztec nation subsequently gathered. The Toltecs were far more refined than their conquerors, and from members of that dispersed nation the Aztecs were first made acquainted with painting, sculpture, astronomy, many of the useful arts, such as working in metals, building bridges and aqueducts, agriculture, &c. 2 See note on page 65, vol. ii. and 3 Charles III., called the Simple, the eighth of the Carlovingian kings of France, ceded to Rolf or Rollo, one of the Northmen chiefs, the large province called by them Normandy. This event occurred in the year 918. Rollo and his subjects embraced Christianity, and became the guardians of France against further invasion from the Northmen. taken from the cloisters of the South and placed within their temples, and upon dreary and desolate Iceland and Norway civilization erected its humanizing altars. Ardent, imaginative, and devotional, they eagerly accepted Christianity, and it became to them really a "Star in the East," leading to where the infant Jesus laid." It was not to them so much a personal treasure to be valued for its immortal blessings, as a glorious idea full of temporal advantage. It became an intense passion, not a sober belief, and its warmth generated mighty events. Among them the spirit of chivalry had its birth and early nurture ; and in those unholy wars against the possessors of the land of Palestine and of the sepulcher of Christ, called the Crusades, which shook the nations during three consecutive centuries, these Northmen furnished the bravest leaders. From such a people, possessed of every attribute necessary to the successful founding of new empires, having the ocean pathway to a broad and fertile continent made clear before them, what great results might not be expected? But, with the prize just within their grasp, they, too, were denied the honor of first peopling our land; yet their mixed descendants, the Anglo-Saxons, now possess it. It is supposed that they attempted settlements, but failed, and in the lapse of centuries their voyages were forgotten, or only remembered in the songs of their bards or the sagas of their romancers. For more than five hundred years after the voyages of those navigators, America was an unknown region; it had no place upon maps, unless as an imaginary island without a name, nor in the most acute geographical theories of the learned.' It was reserved for the son of an humble wool-carder of Genoa to make it known to the world. During the first half of the fifteenth century, maritime discoveries were prosecuted with untiring zeal by the people inhabiting the great peninsula of Southwestern Europe. The incentives to make these discoveries grew out of the political condition of Europe and the promises of great commercial advantages. The rich commerce of the East centered in Rome, when that empire overshadowed the known world; when it fell into fragments, the Italian cities continued their monopoly of the trade of the Indies. Provinces which had become independent kingdoms became jealous of these cities, so rapidly outstripping them in power and opulence; and Castile and Portugal, in particular, engaged in efforts to open a direct trade with the East. The ocean was the only highway for such commerce toward which they could look with a hope of success. The errors of geographical science interposed their obstacles; the belief that a belt of impassable heat girdled the earth at the equator intimidated mariners, and none were willing to double Cape Bojador, beyond which was the fancied region of fire. Prince Henry of Portugal, son of John the First and Philippa of Lancaster (sister of Henry the Fourth of England), having accompanied his father into Africa, in an expedition against the Moors, received much information concerning the mineral riches and fertility of Guinea and other portions of the coast. The idea of making discoveries along the African shores filled his mind, and on his return to Portugal he abandoned the court, retired to a secluded spot near Cape St. Vincent, in full view of the ocean, and drawing around him the most eminent scientific men in the kingdom, pursued geographical and nautical inquiries with untiring zeal. He became convinced that Africa was circumnavigable, and that the "The [Atlantic] Ocean," observes Xerif al Edrisi, an eminent Arabian writer, quoted by Irving, "encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond is unknown. No one has been able to verify any thing concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth, and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some of which are peopled and others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter into its deep waters; or, if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of departing from them. The waves of this ocean, although they roll as high as mountains, yet maintain themselves without breaking, for if they broke, it would be impossible for a ship to plow through them." B |