the comprehensive and yet minute
character of his wonderful mind. A volume of poems shows how sweetly he
could sing. The story of his battles, discloses how bravely he could
fight. The narrative of his voyages proves the boldness of his
seamanship. The calmness of his prison life teaches us the manly lesson
of endurance. The devotion of his wife, denotes how deeply he could
love; while his letters to that cherished woman--those domestic records
in which the heart divulges its dearest secrets--teem with proofs of his
affection and Christianity. Indeed, the gallantry of his courtiership;
the foresight of his statecraft; the splendid dandyism of his apparel;
the wild freedom and companionship of his forest life, show how
completely the fop and the forager, the queenly pet and loyal subject,
the author and the actor, the noble and the democrat, the soldier and
the scholar, were, in the age of Elizabeth and James, blent in one man,
and that man--Sir Walter Raleigh.

Do we not detect in this first adventurous and practical patron of North
America, many of the seemingly discordant qualities which mingle so
commonly in the versatile life of our own people? If the calendar of
courts had its saints, like the calendar of the church, well might Sir
Walter have been canonized as protector of the broad realm for which the
brutal James made him a martyr to the jealousy and fear of Spain.[2]

Queen Elizabeth was the first British Sovereign who built up that
maritime power of England which has converted her magnificent
Island--dot as it is, in the waste of the sea--into the wharf of the
world. She was no friend of the Spaniards, and she had men in her
service who admired Spanish galeons. Wealth, realized in coin, and gold
or silver, in bulk, were tempting merchandize in frail vessels, which
sailors, half pirate, half privateer, might easily deliver of their
burden. It was easier to rob than to mine; and, while Spain performed
the labor in the bowels of the earth, England took the profit as a prize
on the sea! Such were some of the elements of maritime success, which
weakened Spain by draining her colonial wealth, while it enriched her
rival and injured the Catholic sovereign.

Yet, in the ranks of these adventurers, there were men of honest
purpose; and, among the first whose designs of colonization on this
continent were unquestionably conceived in a spirit of discovery and
speculation, was the half brother of Sir Walter Raleigh--Si