COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

DESCRIPTIONS OF NATUEE BY COLUMBUS. 421
the persecutions which he had to encounter, into a feeling of
melancholy and morbid enthusiasm.
In the heroic ages of the Portuguese and Castilian races it
was not thirst for gold alone, as has been asserted from
ignorance of the national character at that period, but rather
a general spirit of daring, that led to the prosecution of distant
voyages. The names of Hayti, Cubagua, and Darien, acted
on the imaginations of men in the beginning of the sixteenth
century in the same manner as those of Tinian and Otaheite
have done in more recent times, since Anson and Cook. If
the narrations of far distant lands then drew the youth of the
and Southern Ger-
Spanish peninsula, Flanders, Lombardy,
many, to rally around the victorious standard of an imperial
leader on the
ridges of the Andes, or the burning plains of
Uraba and Coro, the milder influence of a more modern civilisation,
when all portions of the earth's surface were more
generally accessible, gave other motives and directions to the
restless longing for distant travels. A passionate love of the
study of nature, which originated chiefly in the north, glowed
in the breast of all ; intellectual expansion of views became
associated with enlargement of knowledge ; whilst the poetic
and sentimental tone of feeling, peculiar to the epoch of
which we speak, has, since the close of the last century, been
identified with literary compositions, whose forms were
unknown to former ages.
On casting a retrospective glance on the great discoveries
which prepared the way for this modern tone of feeling, our
attention is especially attracted by the descriptions of nature
which we owe to the pen of Columbus. It is only recently that
we have been in possession of his own ship's journal, his letters
to the Chancellor Sanchez, to the Donna Juana de la Torre,
governess of the Infant Don Juan, and to Queen Isabella. I
have already attempted, in my critical investigation of the
history of the geography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,*
to show with what depth of feeling for nature the
great discoverer was endowed, and how he described the
earth and the new heaven opened to his eyes, (viage nuevo al
nuevo cielo i mundo quefasta entonces estaba en occulto,} with
a beauty and simplicity of expression which can only be ade-
*
Humboldt, Examen critique de Vhistoire de la Geographic du
nouveau Continent t. iii. pp. 227-248,