II. "THE LIttle NapoleON OF CARIBOU," Cornhill Magazine, Edinburgh Review, IV. ART STUDENTSHIP OF THE EARLY ITALIAN Title and Index to Volume CXCIV. 771 National Review, Liverpool Journal of Commerce,. 823 For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. But once he came; he climbed the stair, He knows Phrynette is waiting there, But, ah! the nest is dark and lone, Is this the saddest time?" they said, "Haply," I said, "'tis sad to die; I know a sadder season yet!' They cried, "We hear the thrushes sing, Have fallen like an emerald cloud And banished is the Winter's gloom. Come, say if Spring is sad!" they said. They said, "The Summer heat has come; Hark, hark, the drum! The trumpets blow! The swallows chatter merrily, The battle calls, and he will go; For what is life when love is o'er? Their nests are on the sunlit wall. And say not this is sad!" they said. I said, "I feel the heated air Hang heavy with the breath of flowers, Nor can conceive a world more fair Than this, in these sweet summer hours!' I said, "I see the swallows wheel, This is the saddest time of all! How great! And oft I wonder why!" HEART-STORMS. THE shadow of night is falling, When the storm your waves uplifted, 'Tis when all is calm and peaceful, From The Edinburgh Review. THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.* ALTHOUGH America was no more discovered than Rome was built in a day, yet October 12, 1492, may fitly serve as the representative date of what has been well described as a process rather than an event. On that day Columbus first set foot on transatlantic land, and his doing so proved decisive for the spread westward of European civilization. Events, indeed, might easily have been directed otherwise. The incident might under slightly altered circumstances have remained isolated, and devoid of momentous consequences, like so many others in the history of geographical exploration; and it seemed at first to mark no more than the opening of a long series of tentative gropings after facts confirmatory of a false theory. Nevertheless, as things turned out, that solemn disembarkation of a little band of white men on the palm-fringed shore of Guanahani really typified the effective discovery of the new continent. Its effective, not its formal, discovery. Columbus, like most other innovators in the realms of knowledge and thought, had been anticipated. "Wineland the Good" was no creation of Norse fancy, no shimmering region between sea and sky, where The Spring and the middle Summer sat each on the lap of the breeze, but a concrete strip of coast-land, of ap proximately assignable latitude and longitude, washed perhaps by the same waters in which, one night of December in the year 1773, an obnoxious cargo of tea was memorably engulfed. And the recent erection at Boston of a monument to Leif 1. The Discovery of America. With some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest. By John Fiske. In 2 vols. London: 1892. 2. Narrative and Critical History of America. Edited by Justin Winsor. In 8 vols. London: 1885 Eriksen has lent a kind of official sanction to the claim of that dashing sea-rover to take rank as the pioneer of the Aryan race on American soil. His exploit, although a considerable one, fell in quite naturally with the sequence of preceding events. The overthrow of the Jarls of Norway by Harold Haarfagr drove those restless spirits among them who could not brook the fixed order of a consolidated kingdom, to seek their fortunes outside its bounds; and an exodus ensued more disastrous than plague or famine to many helpless populations. One of the few tranquil episodes in its eventful history was the settlement of Iceland in 874. Thence, by stress of weather, land further west was certain, sooner or later, to be reached; and it actually fell out within two years that one Gunnbjörn found himself icebound for the winter in one of the fiords near Cape Farewell. A century and more passed, however, before the unalluring possibility of adventure in this direction was followed up. It was the outlawry for homicide of Erik the Red in 983 that led to his exploring and colonizing expedition to the frigid peninsula visited by Gunnbjörn. He made his headquarters by the upper Igaliko fiord, near the site of the modern Julianshaab, and there "upon a smooth, grassy plain may still be seen the blocks of sandstone, their chinks caulked ruins of seventeen houses built of rough up with clay and gravel," the dwellings, nine hundred years ago, of the first European settlers in the Western hemisphere. The spot was one of the few in that dismal region where nature wore now and then even the semblance of a smile; and Erik called it "Greenland," somewhat, it may be admitted, on the same advertising principle of nomenclature followed by General Choke and Mr. Scadder in the designation of the "Eden Settlement." And the name, extended from one of its choicest corners to the whole frost-bound Country, survives as if in mockery of the grim reality. From Greenland, the continent of America was attained in precisely the same casual way that Greenland itself had been attained from Iceland. Thus Bjarni Her adventures encountered there by the vikings of old were recounted, century after century, by Icelandic firesides, but kindled no emulative zeal. Only a certain priest, named Erik Gnupsen, having been ap Greenland and Vinland in partibus infidelium," set out in 1121 to search for the more remote section of his diocese. He never returned, that the chroniclers were aware of; and the presumption is strong that he perished on the journey. julfsen, drifting under cover of a fog, in 986, outside the limits of the known world, sighted the densely wooded shore of Maine or Nova Scotia, but had not the curiosity to land, and made little of his adventure. Its significance was not, how-pointed by Pope Paschal II. "bishop of ever, lost upon Leif, son of the homicidal Erik, a thoughtful and strenuous man, not devoid of grasp upon the present and insight into the future. A trip to Norway in 998 brought about his conversion to Christianity; he carried missionaries back with him to Greenland; then, in the From Greenland, too, the outposts of year 1000, equipped a “dragon ship" for civilization were eventually withdrawn. a journey to the west. His first landfall The native Esquimaux, known only by was most likely somewhere in Labrador; archæological traces to the comrades of and he named the country, from its dreary Erik the Red, again, in course of time, and stone-strewn aspect," Helluland," i.e., migrated southward, and before the close "slate land," Further south, the explor- of the fifteenth century overwhelmed the ers disembarked on the sylvan shore of intruders into their forsaken haunts. The the so-called "Markland," plausibly iden- massive ruin, however, of what was once tified with some part either of Cape Breton the cathedral church of Gardar remains, Island or of Nova Scotia; but the dense and will probably long remain, standing forest-growth did not encourage tarrying, by the melancholy fiord of Kakortok, a and they determined to draw another lot conspicuous memorial of antique Christian out of the lap of the sea. This time they occupation. Only in the eighteenth cenwere in luck. A short run before a stiff tury the devastation was to some extent north-easter brought them to a fertile repaired by the planting of fresh settlestrand where the waters abounded with|ments along the barely habitable coasts excellent fish, fields waved yellow with fringing the glaciated central mass of the maize, and wild vines, in that autumnal peninsula. season, drooped under a heavy burden of grapes. They called the place accordingly "Vinland," and wintered there in great comfort. Leif's return to Greenland with a cargo of timber prompted sundry colonizing efforts, notably an energetic one by Thorfinn Karlsefni; and since the natives, who seem to have been Algonquin Indians, eagerly bartered rich furs for worthless strips of scarlet cloth, trade with them was exceedingly profitable. These "Skraelings," as they are designated in the Sagas, were terribly afraid of the strange beasts brought from over the sea; and the bellowing of Thorfinn's bull on one occasion sent them into hiding for three weeks. Yet their hostility ended by becoming formidable, and led, in the course of twelve years, to the abandonment of this early attempt to secure a foothold for a European race on the western continent. Vinland became a dim tradition. The The Vinland of the Sagas may be located with some confidence on the shore of Massachusetts Bay. In the neighborhood of Cape Cod the fox-grape still ripens freely, and Indian corn unsheaths its tasselled ears almost spontaneously. The mildness of the winter climate, besides, and the length of the winter days, which excited the comments of unaccustomed Icelanders, suggest a region certainly not more inclement than New England. But material vestiges of this curious adventure in colonization are scanty, or non-existent. Only by a stretch of romantic credulity are we even allowed to suppose that the "skeleton in armor," dug up many years ago near Fall River, and sung of by Longfellow in a spirited ballad, represented the genuine remains of some slain comrade of Thorfinn or of Thorvald. The Norse discovery of America remained absolutely barren of results. The In so far [our present authority continues] as the attention of people in Europe was called to any quarter of the globe outside of the seething turbulence in which they dwelt, it was directed toward Asia. Until after 1492, Europe stood with her back toward the Atlantic. What there might be out beyond that used commonly to be called, was a question "Sea of Darkness" (Mare Tenebrosum), as it of little interest, and seems to have excited no speculation. In the view of medieval Europe records of it assumed, as time went on, a legendary air. They were not discredited, but just inferences from them were ignored. The performance, in fact, came to nothing, because it came too soon. There was not knowledge enough in men's minds to serve as a measure of its importance. That "the merry world was round" was not even a general conviction. Indeed, the possibility of antipodal existence ranked merely as a learned extravagance the inhabited world was cut off on the west of opinion. Besides, the geographical inquisitiveness of modern times had not then begun to develop; nor, in the backward state of navigation, could much satisfaction have been procured for it, had it been as full-fledged and keen-witted as it is now. All this is admirably explained by Mr. Fiske in the able work named at the head of this article. It is learned in substance, and lucid in style; and condenses a vast amount of varied information into a skilfully constructed and agreeable narrative. None of the Icelandic references to Markland and Vinland [we read in it] betray a consciousness that these countries belong to a geographical world outside of Europe. There was not enough organized geographical knowledge for that. They were simply conceived as remote places beyond Greenland, inhabited by inferior but dangerous people. The accidental finding of such places served neither to solve any great commercial problem nor to gratify and provoke scientific curiosity. It was, therefore, not at all strange that it bore no fruit. (Vol. i., p. 257.) Moreover by this mysterious ocean, and on the south by the burning sands of Sahara; but eastward it stretched out no one knew how far, and in that direction dwelt tribes and nations which Europe, from time immemorial, had reason to fear. (Vol. i., p. 260.) The process by which the direction of outlook came to be reversed was slow and complex. First of all, the conquests of Genghis Khan cleared the way to Cathay - so China was designated from the ruling dynasty of the Khitai; and thus it came to European knowledge that the country was bounded on the east, not by the Ptolemaic swamp neither sea Nor good dry landbut by a navigable ocean. The bearers of this noteworthy intelligence, about the middle of the thirteenth century, were two Franciscan monks, Giovanni Carpini and Willem de Rubruquis, emissaries to the great khan from pope Innocent IV. and St. Louis of France, respectively. Then came the voyage of Ser Marco Polo, bringing experimental verification of the fact; while its significance was implied by Roger Bacon's citation of ancient opinions to the effect that, between the Pillars lay open for colonization, Europe could not of Hercules and the Indian mainland, have taken advantage of the fact. Now and stretched one wide, yet by no means imthen a ship might make its way, or be blown, measurable or impassable, sea. It was across the waste of waters without compass this fortunately conceived and fortunately or astrolabe; but until these instruments were promulgated error that led to the discovat hand anything like systematic ocean nav-ery of America. For Columbus, enthuigation was out of the question; and from a colonization which could only begin by creeping up into the Arctic seas and taking Greenland on the way, not much was to be expected even if it had been realized, and could have been duly proclaimed throughout Europe, that across the broad Atlantic a new world after all. The westward tendency of the "star of empire," too, was, in the eleventh century, very far from being recognized. siast though he was, would never have pursued the setting sun across the sea of darkness unless he had been convinced that, on the other side, lay a land of light. Exploration in the abstract inspired him with no passion. He had a definite purpose in view; his eyes were fixed on a goal which he deemed it a certainty to |
