Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/32

12 awe of their profound silence, broken only by the water-fall, the rushing deer, the rustling bough, the buzzing insect, the croaking frog. We shall soon read the charming description which Columbus gave of the scene that first opened on the eyes of the Spaniards. The first adventurers, landing at the mouth of James River, in the very glory and gush of summer beauty in 1607, were in an ecstasy of exuberant delight at the scene, its sights and odors for the senses. The oysters, says George Percy, brother of the Duke of Northumberland, “lay on the ground as thick as stones, many with pearls in them; the earth all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colors and kinds, as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England; the woods full of cedar and cypress trees, which issue out sweet gums like to balsam.” And the veritable John Smith, whose prowess may cover his whole posterity by name, averred that “Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.” Governor Winthrop, reaching our own rude coast in June, 1630, wrote: “We had so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us; and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.”

While our domain is arraying itself in the garb and finish of civilization, with its cities and manufactories, there is one of its ancient glories which our near posterity will never behold. It is that of the endless forest shadowed with a deeper than a dim religious light, — a sombre and awful solitude, silent in the calm, but reverberating with Æolian blasts in summer or winter tempests.

What a boon was offered to humanity in the Old World when the veil that had hidden this New World was pierced and lifted! Here was opened for humanity a fresh, fair field, substantially we may say untried, untilled, unpenetrated, and, as the new comers chose to regard it, in larger part unpeopled. We who live upon it have not yet taken the inventory of our possessions; we know but little more