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52 above the level of the sea, and stretching on every side we know not over how many hundred thousands of square miles. There, under the tropics and beneath a tropical sun, is a temperate atmosphere, cool, salubrious, and bracing. There, almost within sight of the deadly miasma of the coast, is a new climate, which deals kindly even with a European constitution. There all the great cereals of the North, the wheat, the barley, the corn, come to their most luxuriant perfection. And so it is literally true, that, travelling a few hundred miles from Gulf to Ocean, you pass through more climates and see a wider variety of vegetation than if you traversed our whole country from the great lakes in the North to the southernmost cape of Florida. Nay, so striking is this contact of the zones, that in that table-land itself are, it is said, deep valleys, where with one glance the eye may behold far up the deep shades of the pine, while below waves the feathery grace of the palm,—or where one may walk amid familiar waving grain, and see beneath him, descending in beautiful gradation, the corn, the olive, the sugar-cane, down to depths where a torrid clime lavishes its full wealth of verdure.

Here, too, is the true Ophir; here, the rivers that roll down their yellow sands. For here are the veins of gold that attracted the Spaniard with his fatal greed, and the mines of silver that for three hundred years have been yielding untold treasures, and to-day are as ready as ever to yield untold treasures more. With such germs of wealth hidden in her soil, what was needed to make Mexico one of the master-nations but men? What, to crowd her ports with ships, to make her borders pleasant with the hum of industry, and to fill her storehouses with its products, but the same sagacity and energy which have made the sterile hills of New England populous, and which are now transforming the prairies of the West into one broad cornfield? Was it surprising, then, that fifty years ago men were dreaming great things of Mexico?

And it will not be denied that into men's estimate of her future some elements of romance entered, to blind their eyes and to distort their judgment. This was the land of Cortés and Montezuma. Here it was that the Spaniard, fresh from the conquest of fair Granada, found in the depths of the New World a barbarian civilization which mocked the pomp and luxury of the Moor. Here, on these plains, beneath these mountains, on the bosom of these tranquil lakes, was transacted that marvellous episode in history, which, on the pages of Prescott, looks like the creations of the fabled Genii. Here an aboriginal race rose to more than aboriginal splendor; and here, beneath the conqueror's heel, they sank to unsounded depths of misery and servitude. He must have a prosaic nature to whom the memories and associations of such a land do not come glowing with the warm flush of sentiment and romance.

There was much, too, in the long and bitter struggle by which this people were winning their independence, which appealed to the sympathy of men who had just achieved their own freedom. Very likely, as we read now the history of that struggle,—as we see how little of any broad and generous patriotism entered into it,—as we mark how every step was stained with blood and darkened by cruel passions,—as we behold on every field the selfish ambition of petty men taking the place of the self-devotion of great souls, it will not look heroic. But it did once. Men saw it from afar off. They beheld in it the ancient conflict between liberty and oppression. It was the time-worn story, of men in poverty, of men in exile, of men dying for freedom.

Thus, from one cause or another, from reasons of utility or from reasons of sentiment and imagination, it is certain that many cherished the highest hopes for Mexico, and saw before her a long future of rare prosperity and honor. "It is to Mexico," writes a glowing admirer, "that we turn and turn again with fond delight. We invoke the reader to ponder her present position, her capacity for