whose fame will last through all the generations of men. And as I
survey that lonely, abstracted, disappointed, and derided man,--
poor and unimportant, so harassed by debt that his creditors seized
even his maps and charts, obliged to fly from one country to
another to escape imprisonment, without even listeners and still
less friends, and yet with ever-increasing faith in his cause,
utterly unconquerable, alone in opposition to all the world,--I
think I see the most persistent man of enterprise that I have read
of in history. Critics ambitious to say something new may rake out
slanders from the archives of enemies, and discover faults which
derogate from the character we have been taught to admire and
venerate; they may even point out spots, which we cannot disprove,
in that sun of glorious brightness, which shed its beneficent rays
over a century of darkness,--but this we know, that, whatever may
be the force of detraction, his fame has been steadily increasing,
even on the admission of his slanderers, for three centuries, and
that he now shines as a fixed star in the constellation of the
great lights of modern times, not alone because he succeeded in
crossing the ocean, when once embarked on it, but for surmounting
the moral difficulties which lay in his way before he could embark
upon it, and for being finally instrumental in conferring the
greatest boon that our world has received from any mortal man,
since Noah entered into the ark.

I think it is Lamartine who has said that truly immortal
benefactors have seldom been able to accomplish their mission
without the encouragement of either saints or women. This is
emphatically true in the case of Columbus. The door to success was
at last opened to him by a friendly and sympathetic friar of a
Franciscan convent near the little port of Palos, in Andalusia.