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were self-expatriated in spirit. I like not the attitude. Give us men
who love native land beyond all other lands, and who, removed
therefrom, turn homesick eyes toward its invisible boundaries. Irving,
admirable in many ways, was in no way more to be admired than in his
predilection for his country as a theme for his historian's muse. To
him pay tribute, because he is historian of the discovery of our brave
Western Hemisphere. Irving has told the story of that great admiral of
the ocean, Christopher Columbus. This memoir may not be exact. Irving
may have idealized this pathfinder of the ocean; though if he has, he
has observed the proprieties, literary and imaginative, as many
successors have not. Some writers are seemingly bent on making every
great soul commonplace, thinking that if they fail to belittle a
distinguished benefactor of the race, if they have not played the
Vandal with a swagger and conceit like Jack Falstaff, they have
ignominiously failed; when the plain truth is, that if they succeeded
in taking the glamour for those heroes of whom they write, they have
hurt mankind so far, and have impoverished imagination and endeavor by
their invidious task. We need not suppose Christopher Columbus and
Washington saints, seeing there is no inclination to canonize them; but
we need not hold their follies up to wake the guffaw of a crowd. Such
laughter is dearly bought. One thing I hold so true no reasoning can
damage it; namely, that a man like Columbus had nobler moods on which
he voyaged as his caravel through the blue seas. Columbus was no
swineherd, but a dreamer, whose dreams enlarged the world by half, and
gave a new civilization room and triumph. He was of his age, and his
morality was not unimpeachable; but in him were still great moralities
and humanities. He had mountain-tops in his spirits, and on these
peaks he stood. What puerile work it is to attempt robbing Columbus of
his discoverer's glory by attempting to show how vikings discovered
this continent! Such historians might fight a less bloody battle still
by showing that the aborigines discovered this continent before the
Norsemen did! What boots such folly? What gold of benefit comes of
such quests? Certain we are that when Columbus set sail for a New
World, no one believed the earth was round as he did, and no one knew
the Norsemen had piloted across seas and found land; and Europe was
ignorant of any shore westward, and Columbu