The Bahama Sea is perhaps the most beautiful of all waters. Columbus
beheld it and its islands with a poet's eye.

"It only needed the singing of the nightingale," said the joyful
mariner, "to make it like Andalusia in April;" and to his mind Andalusia
was the loveliest place on earth. In sailing among these gardens of the
seas in the serene and transparent autumn days after the great
discovery, the soul of Columbus was at times overwhelmed and entranced
by a sense of the beauty of everything in it and about it. Life seemed,
as it were, a spiritual vision.

"I know not," said the discoverer, "where first to go; nor are my eyes
ever weary of gazing on the beautiful verdure. The singing of the birds
is such that it seems as if one would never desire to depart hence."

He speaks in a poet's phrases of the odorous trees, and of the clouds of
parrots whose bright wings obscured the sun. His descriptions of the sea
and its gardens are full of glowing and sympathetic colorings, and all
things to him had a spiritual meaning.

"God," he said, on reviewing his first voyage over these western waters,
"God made me the messenger of the new heavens and earth, and told me
where to find them. Charts, maps, and mathematical knowledge had nothing
to do with the case."

On announcing his discovery on his return, he breaks forth into the
following highly poetic exhortation: "Let processions be formed, let
festivals be held, let lauds be sung. Let Christ rejoice on earth."

Columbus was a student of the Greek and Latin poets, and of the poetry
of the Hebrew Scriptures. The visions of Isaiah were familiar to him,
and he thought that Isaiah himself at one time appeared to him in a
vision. He loved nature. To him the outer world was a garment of the
Invisible; and it was before his great soul had suffered
disappointment that he saw the sun-flooded waters of the Bahama Sea
and the purple splendors of the Antilles.

[Illustration: THE PASEO COLON (COLUMBUS PROMENADE), BARCELONA, SPAIN.

With the Columbus Monument in the background.

See page 81]

There is scarcely an adjective in the picturesque report of Columbus in
regard to this sea and these islands that is not now as appropriate and
fitting as in the days when its glowing words delighted Isabella 400
years ago.

WHEN HISTORY DOES THEE WRONG.

GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON, one of England's famous poets. Born
in London, January 22, 1788; died at Missolonghi, Gr