Humboldt gives the verses in the following form:—
“Venient annis sæcula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus,
Tethysque novos detegat orbes,
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.”[247]
This sympathetic and authoritative commentator, who has illustrated the enterprise with all that classical or mediæval literature affords, declares his conviction that the discovery of a new continent was more completely foreshadowed in the simple geographical statement of the Greek Strabo,[248] who, after a long life of travel, sat down in his old age, during the reign of Augustus, to write the geography of the world, including its cosmography. In this work, where are gathered the results of ancient study and experience, the venerable author, after alluding to the possibility of passing direct from Spain to India, and explaining that the inhabited world is that which we inhabit and know, thus lifts the curtain: “There may be in the same temperate zone two and indeed more inhabited lands, especially near the parallel of Thinæ or Athens, prolonged into the Atlantic Ocean.”[249] This was the voice of ancient Science.
Before the voyage of Columbus two Italian poets seem to have beheld the unknown world. The first was Petrarca; nor was it unnatural that his exquisite genius should reach behind the veil of Time, as where he pictures
“The daylight hastening with wingèd steps,