never
rifled the mine. I found a bold Genoese, and led him to the discovering
of a new world. With its metals I inundated the old; and to my misery
added the misery of two hemispheres.

Yet the circle of passion was not to surround my fated steps for ever.
Noble aspirations rose in my melancholy heart. I had seen the birth of
true science, true liberty, and true wisdom. I had lived with Petrarch,
stood enraptured beside the easel of Angelo and Raphael. I had stood at
Maintz, beside the wonder-working machine that makes knowledge
imperishable, and sends it with winged speed through the earth. At the
pulpit of the mighty man of Wittenberg I had knelt; Israelite as I was,
and am, I did involuntary homage to the mind of Luther.

At this hour I see the dawn of things to whose glory the glory of the
past is but a dream. But I must close these thoughts, wandering as the
steps of my pilgrimage. I have more to tell--strange, magnificent, and
sad. But I must await the impulse of my heart.

* * * * *

RICHARD HENRY DANA

Two Years Before the Mast

Richard Henry Dana was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
August 1, 1815. He was the son of the American poet who, with
W.C. Bryant, founded "The North American Review," and grandson
of Francis Dana, for some time United States Minister to
Russia, and afterwards Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Young
Dana entered Harvard in 1832, but being troubled with an
affection of the eyes, shipped as a common sailor on board an
American merchant vessel, and made a voyage round Cape Horn to
California and back. His experiences are embodied in his "Two
Years Before the Mast," which was published in 1840, about
three years after his return, when he had graduated at
Harvard, and in the year in which he was admitted to the
Massachusetts Bar. His best known work gives a vivid account
of life at sea in the days of the old sailing ships, touches
sympathetically on the hardships of the seafaring life, which
its publication helped to ameliorate, and affords also an
intimate glimpse of California when it was still a province of
Mexico. "If," he writes, "California ever becomes a prosperous
country, this--San Francisco--bay will be the centre of its
prosperity." He died at Rome on January 7, 1882.

_I.--Life on a Merchantman_

On August 14 the brig Pilgrim