"Was this his face, and these the finding eyes "He on the waters dared to set his feet, And through believing planted earth's last race. Those faithful, finding eyes of Columbus! For now four hundred years they have looked outward upon the westward 1 This address, by Professor Herbert B. Adams, was given at the Peabody Institute, Monday evening, October 10, 1892, to the officers and students of the Johns Hopkins University, and their friends, at the opening of the seventeenth academic year. This noble poem, "On a Portrait of Columbus," by Professor George E. Woodberry, of Columbia College, first appeared in The Century Magazine, May, 1892. The fine portrait which accompanied Mr. Woodberry's poem in that number was a copy of the "Columbus" now preserved in the Museum of the Ministry of Marine at Madrid. The picture was shown in enlarged form to the audience during the reading of the poem and the paragraph immediately following it. course of empire in the new hemisphere which he first opened to discovery and conquest. Our modern eyes seek in vain to arrest that steadfast, far-away gaze, which seems to be looking into a future beyond our own. In the radiant light of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, millions of men and women will look upon this man's face with curious or admiring eyes; but when this generation, and many hundred years shall have passed away, those "finding eyes" will still be shining on through art, and poetry and history, like stars in the firmament. There is a certain immortality in a great deed, like that of Columbus, which makes the doer, even though in many respects an ordinary man of his time, forever memorable. The discovery of America has been called the greatest event in secular history. This dictum may shock the ancients and startle the moderns; but let the mind of reflecting students range at will, through the centuries, back and forth in the galleries of human achievement, and determine if you can what single secular deed even approximates in grandeur and far-reaching historic significance to the finding of a new world on this earth, with which planet alone history is concerned. What are all the conquests of antiquity, or the decisive battles and great inventions of mankind, compared with America, time's noblest offspring? The passage of Christopher Columbus across the western sea, bearing the weight of Christendom and European civilization, opened the way for the greatest migrations in human history, for the steady march of enlightened nations towards civil and religious liberty. The discovery of America was the first crossing of Oceanus, that great and murmuring stream, which flowed around the old Mediterranean world. Amid the groaning and travailing of human creation, men burst the confines of that outward sea and began to people new continents. I tell you, sirs, the modern history of Europe, with its long exodus of hungry, landless peoples, with its epoch-making wars, its revolutions in church and state, were conditioned by that one secular event called the discovery of America. Great deeds in history do not, however, stand alone. High mountains, grand and imposing though they may seem to the distant beholder, are after all simply conspicuous parts of our common earth. The loftiest peaks descend gradually to foothills, upland plateaus, lower plains, and finally to the level of the all-uniting sea. Nothing is isolated in nature or in human achievement. Great discoverers are like mountainclimbers, who by the aid of material vantage-ground and human experience, ascend height upon height until at last they stand like stout Balboa, when, silent upon a peak in Darien, with eagle eye he stared at the Pacific. The discovery of America was foreordained from the beginning of the old classic world, when geographical science first began to move, "but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point," around the headlands of the Mediterranean Sea. Six hundred years B. C. the bold Phoenician sailors, under Egyptian auspices, circumnavigated Africa, sailing from East to West around what we now call the Cape of Good Hope, and returning in three years past the pillars of Hercules, through the straits of Gibraltar. Five hundred years before Christ, Hanno, the Carthaginian, anticipated the Portuguese discovery of the Canary Islands and the west coast of Africa. Pythagoras and the Greek philosophers taught that the world is round. Plato, inspired by current traditions, based perhaps on physical facts, wrote in his dialogues of the continent of Atlantis, which had been submerged in the western sea. Aristotle believed that the inhabited earth, oikoumené gé, was only one of several continents. He had the correct theory of the globe. Indeed, all modern discovery was anticipated in the following scientific statement: "In common speech," says Aristotle," we speak of our world (oikoumene) as divided into continents and islands. This is wrong. The oikoumené, as known to us, is really a single island, lying in the midst of the Atlantic. Probably there are other similar oikoumenai, some larger than ours, some smaller, separated from it by the sea." In his treatise on the Heavens (ii, 14), Aristotle said "those persons who connect the region in the neighborhood of the Pillars of Hercules with that towards India, and who assert that in this way the sea is one, do not assert things very improbable." Here is a full-orbed scientific idea which finally conquered and possessed the round world.' Greek thought was prophetic. Greek history foreshadowed the history of Europe, which is simply a greater Hellas, as America is an imperial and transatlantic Magna Graecia. Nothing of Greece doth fade but suffers a sea-change into something rich and strange. All our modern discoveries, colonization, politics, art, education, civilization, Christendom, the Oikoumenê, the great globe itself, are simply Greek ideas enlarged by historic processes of development. "The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tables yet unbroken; The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak, or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind. 1" Greek speculation survived, though it missed reduction into practice. Strabo, who was master of all the geographical fact and theory of his time, was not likely to neglect Aristotle's memorable conjecture of more oikoumenai than one. With almost prophetic insight, he even improved on it. Besides a Terra Australis, such as Aristotle had indicated, he clearly foreshadowed the discovery of a Terra Occidentalis, occupying the same latitudes as the old oikoumené itself. 'Possibly,' he says, 'the same temperate zone may contain two or more oikoumenai. It is even likely that such are to be found in the parallel of Athens.' Were this the case, the physical objection to the practicability of a westward voyage to India would probably cease: for the new oikoumenai might serve as stepping-stones to the westward explorer. This remarkable anticipation goes far to justify the words of an enthusiastic modern geographer, who declares that the nations of Europe from remote antiquity were gifted with a divine intuition which revealed to them another great world beyond their horizon, and whispered that this world was their natural patrimony. Aristotle had guessed at the plurality of oikoumenai: Strabo suggested the existence of another oikoumene occupying the same latitudes as the old world, that is, the existence of America." (History of the New World Called America, vol. I, pp. 36-37, by Edward John Payne.) Strabo, i, 31, quoting Krates, speaks of the western voyage of Menelaos from Gades to India (Dr. A. Gudeman, Philological Association, J. H. U.) We have been taught that Hebrew prophecy was history and Hebrew history was prophecy. There is a remarkable verse from Seneca, who has won eternal fame from Clio for these few words, once prophetic now historic: Venient annis saecula seris, -Medea, 378-382. In the Columbian library at Valladolid there is a copy of Seneca's tragedies published at Venice in 1510. Upon the margin of the verse from the Medea which has been quoted, Ferdinand, the son of Columbus, wrote in Latin, "This prophecy was fulfilled by my father, Christopher Columbus, the admiral, in 1492." Dante was the poet-prophet of the Middle Ages and the historian of ancient culture. In the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, the Italian poet, under the guidance of the Latin Virgil, meets Odysseus, the Grecian type of Columbus, the adventurous navigator, who had sailed every sea. To Dante Odysseus narrates how once he and his companions steered westward past the pillars of Hercules, out upon the ocean, seeking a new world. "O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand With this brief exhortation for the voyage, That then I hardly could have held them back." They rowed away from the morning and made wings of their oars for a mad flight into another hemisphere. They |