d the belief
that, within ten days journey towards the setting of the sun, there
was a country where gold might be washed from the sand, and where the
natives themselves had learned the use of the crucible; but definite
and accurate as were the accounts, inquiry was always baffled; and the
regions of gold remained for two centuries an undiscovered land.

Various were the employments by which the calmness of life was relieved.
George Sandys, an idle man, who had been a great traveller, and who did
not remain in America, a poet, whose verse was tolerated by Dryden
and praised by Isaac Walton, beguiled the ennui of his seclusion by
translating the whole of Ovid's Metamorphoses. To the man of leisure the
chase furnished a perpetual resource. It was not long before the horse
was multiplied in Virginia; and to improve that noble animal was early
an object of pride, soon to be favored by legislation. Speed was
especially valued, and "the planters pace" became a proverb....

* * * * *

=_130_=. CONTRAST OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH COLONIZATION IN AMERICA.

In Asia, the victories of Olive at Plassy, of Coote at the Wandewash,
and of Watson and Pococke on the Indian seas, had given England the
undoubted ascendency in the East Indies, opening to her suddenly the
promise of untold treasures and territorial acquisitions without end. In
America, the Teutonic race, with its strong tendency to individuality
and freedom, was become the master from the Gulf of Mexico to the Poles;
and the English tongue, which but a century and a half before had for
its entire world a part only of two narrow islands on the outer verge
of Europe, was now to spread more widely than any that had ever given
expression to human thought.

Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, language of my country,
take possession of the North American continent! Gladden the waste
places with every tone that has been rightly struck on the English lyre,
with every English word that has been spoken well for liberty and for
man! Give an echo to the now silent and solitary mountains; gush out
with the fountains that as yet sing their anthems all day long without
response; fill the valleys with the voices of love in its purity, the
pledges of friendship in its faithfulness; and as the morning sun drinks
the dewdrops from the flowers all the way from the dreary Atlantic to
the Peaceful Ocean, meet him with the joyous hum of the early industry