And inland seas for commerce spread the wave
With nobler floods the sea-like rivers roll,
And fairer luster purples round the pole.
Timothy Dwight.
VERY nation eminent for its refinement, displayed in the cultivation of the arts, had its heroic age; a period when its first physical and moral conquests were achieved, and when rude society, with all its impurities, was fused and refined in the crucible of progress. When civilization first set up its standard as a permanent ensign in the Western hemisphere, northward of the Bahamas and the great Gulf, and the contests for possession began between the wild Aborigines, who thrust no spade into the soil, no sickle into ripe harvests, and those earnest delvers from the Old World, who came with the light of Christianity to plant a new empire and redeem the wilderness by cultivation, then commenced the heroic age of America. It ended when the work of the Revolution, in the eighteenth century, was accomplished; when the bond of vassalage to Great Britain was severed by her colonies, and when the thirteen confederated States ratified a federal Constitution, and upon it laid the broad foundation of our Republic.
Those ancient civilizations, registered by the stylus of history, were mere gloamings of morning compared with the noontide radiance which now lights up the Western World; and even the more modern nations of Europe, brilliant as they appear, have so many dark spots upon the disk of their enlightenment, that their true glory is really less than that of the waxing Star in the West. These ancient and modern civilizations, now past or at their culminating points, were the results of the slow progress of centuries; the heroic age {xvi}of America, meteor-like, was brilliant and rapid in its course, occupying the space of only a century and a half of time from the permanent implanting of a British colony, weak and dependent, to the founding of our government, which, like Pallas Athena, was, at its birth, full panoplied, strong, eminently individual in its character, and full of recuperative energies. The head of Britannia was cleft by the Vulcan of the Revolution, and from its teeming brain leaped the full-grown daughter, sturdy and defiant.
Long anterior to the advent of Europeans in America, a native empire, but little inferior to Old Rome in civilization, flourished in that region of our continent which now forms the southwestern portion of the Republic. The Aztec empire, which reached the acme of its refinement during the reign of Montezuma, and crumbled into fragments when Cortez dethroned and murdered that monarch, extended over the whole of Central America: and when 1521. the Spaniards came it was gradually pushing its conquests northward, where all was yet darkness and gloom. To human apprehension, this people, apparently allied by various ties to the wild nations of North America, appeared to be the most efficient instruments in spreading the light of civilization over the whole continent; yet they were not only denied this glorious privilege, but, by the very race which first attempted to plant the seeds of European refinement in Florida and among the Mobilian tribes, and to shed the illumination of their dim Christianity over the dreary regions of the North, was their own bright light extinguished. The Aztecs and their neighbors were beaten into the dust of debasement by the falchion blows of avarice and bigotry, and they form, apparently, not the most insignificant atom of the chain of events which connects the history of the empires of the Old World with that of our Republic.