Page 80 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

The Isthmus and Sea Power 61 ;

true glory of his grand conception, as well as
delaying its fulfilment to a far distant future.
The story of his actual achievement is
sufficiently known to all readers, and need not
be repeated here. Amid the many disap-
pointments and humiliations which succeeded
the brief triumphant blaze of his first return,
and clouded the latter years of his life, Co-
lumbus was spared the pang of realizing that
the problem was insoluble for the time. Like
many a prophet before him, he knew not what,
nor what manner of time, the spirit that was
in him foretold, and died the happier for his
ignorance. The certainty that a wilderness,
peopled by savages and semi-barbarians, had
been added to the known world, would have
been a poor awakening from the golden dreams
of beneficent glory as well as of profit which
so long had beckoned him on. That the
western land he had discovered interposed
a barrier to the further progress of ships
towards his longed-for goal, as inexorable
as the mountain ranges and vast steppes of
Asia, was mercifully concealed from his eyes
"
and the elusive " secret of the strait through
which he to the last hoped to pass, though