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of physical decay, and whose English heart, within a
palsied frame, still beat with an undying love for his country?
The judgments of the tribunals of the Old World are often reversed by public opinion in the
New. The family of the chief author of early colonization in the
United States was reduced to beggary by the government of
England, and he himself was beheaded.
After a lapse of nearly two centuries, the state of North
Carolina, by a solemn act of legislation, revived in its capital ‘the city of
Raleigh;’ thus expressing its
grateful respect for the memory of the extraordinary man, who united in himself as many kinds of glory as were ever combined in an individual.
The enthusiasm of
Raleigh pervaded his countrymen.
Imagination already saw beyond the
Atlantic a people whose mother idiom should be the language of
England.
‘Who knows,’ exclaimed
Daniel, the poet laureate of that kingdom—
“Who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasures of our tongue?
To what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
Ta enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds, in th' yet unformed Occident,
May 'come refined with th' accents that are ours?”
Already the fishing of
Newfoundland was vaunted
as the stay of the west countries.
Some traffic may
nave continued with
Virginia.
Thus were men trained for the career of discovery; and in 1602,
Bartholomew Gosnold, who, perhaps, had already sailed to
Virginia, with the usual route, by the Canaries and
West Indies, conceiving the idea of a direct voyage to
America, with the concurrence of
Raleigh, had well nigh secured to
New England the honor of the first permanent English colony.
Steering, in a small bark, directly
across the
Atlantic, in seven weeks he reached the
