Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/283

Rh And richer freights ye 'll furnish far

Than Africa or Malabar.

Be fair, be fertile evermore,

Ye rumored but untrodden shore,

Princes and monarchs will contend

Who first unto your land shall send,

And pawn the jewels of the crown

To call your distant soil their own.

Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner's compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and as it were in a straight line.—

Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns