As our steamer moved out of the water of Santo Domingo our eyes remained fixed on the Cathedral, whose Spanish tiled roof reflected the vermilion rays of the setting sun, and afford shelter for one of the world’s greatest heroes and benefactors.
“Hic locus abscondit præclari membra Coloni,”
This place hides the remains of the illustrious Columbus, of him who, in the language of one of the many epitaphs devoted to his memory,
“Dió riquezas immensas á la tierra,
Innumerables almas al cielo.”[32]
And then, as the last vestiges of this noble old temple vanished from our vision, we thought of the words of Humboldt, than whom no one was better qualified to pronounce a fitting eulogy on one of the world’s immortals.
“The majesty of great memories,” he declares, “seems concentrated in the name of Christopher Columbus. It is the originality of his vast conceptions, the compass and fertility of his genius, and the courage which bore out against the long series of misfortunes, which have exalted the Admiral high above all his contemporaries.”[33]
And we dreamed—or was it a telepathic intimation of a future reality?—when the precious remains, that have so long been guarded in this distant and rarely visited island, should be transferred for a third and a last time, but this time where they might be visited and venerated by millions instead of the few hundred that now find their way hither, and where they might occupy a noble sarcophagus, like that which beneath the dome of the Invalides, holds all that is mortal of the great Corsican, and in a temple worthy alike of the man and of the greatest nation in the world. There is one edifice in which all the nations of the hemisphere discovered by Columbus have a common interest, the splendid structure now being erected in Washington, for the special use and benefit of the North and South American Republics. Here in the capital of the nation, in the district named after the discoverer, in sight of the tomb of the “Father of his Country,” should the remains of “The Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” find an abiding place of sepulture commensurate with the magnitude of his achievements. Alongside and in connection with this Pan-American building, in the heart of what is to be “the City Beautiful,” and there alone, let there be erected a mausoleum that, as a monument of art, shall rank, as did those of Hadrian and Mausolus, amongst the world’s wonders, and be a fitting culmination of the architectural creations that have been planned for the great and growing capital of the New World, the world of Columbus.