Given at Rome, near St. Peter's, July 16th of the year 1892, the fifteenth of our Pontificate. LEO XIII., _Pope_. TO SPAIN. CAPEL LOFFT. O generous nation! to whose noble boast, Illustrious Spain, the providence of Heaven A radiant sky of vivid power hath given, A land of flowers, of fruits, profuse; an host Of ardent spirits; when deprest the most, By great, enthusiastic impulse driven To deeds of highest daring. WRAPPED IN A VISION GLORIOUS. The Rev. JOHN LORD, LL. D., a popular American lecturer and Congregational minister. Born in Portsmouth, N. H., December 27, 1810. Wrapped up in those glorious visions which come only to a man of superlative genius, and which make him insensible to heat and cold and scanty fare, even to reproach and scorn, this intrepid soul, inspired by a great and original idea, wandered from city to city, and country to country, and court to court, to present the certain greatness and wealth of any state that would embark in his enterprise. But all were alike cynical, cold, unbelieving, and even insulting. He opposes overwhelming universal and overpowering ideas. To have surmounted these amid such protracted opposition and discouragment constitutes his greatness; and finally to prove his position by absolute experiment and hazardous enterprise makes him one of the greatest of human benefactors, whose fame will last through all the generations of men. And as I survey that lonely, abstracted, disappointed, and derided man--poor and unimportant; so harassed by debt that his creditors seized even his maps and charts; obliged to fly from one country to another to escape imprisonment; without even listeners and still less friends, and yet with ever-increasing faith in his cause; utterly unconquerable; alone in opposition to all the world--I think I see the most persistent man of enterprise that I have read of in history. Critics ambitious to say something new may rake out slanders from the archives of enemies and discover faults which derogate from the character we have been taught to admire and venerate; they may even point out spots, which we can not disprove, in that sun of glorious brightness which shed its beneficent rays over a century of darkness--but this we know, that whatever may be the force of detraction, his fame has been steadily increasing, even on the admission of his slanderers, for three centuries, and that he now shines as a fixed star in the constellation of the great lights of modern times, not only because he succeeded in crossing the ocean when once embarked on it, but for surmounting the moral difficulties which lay in his way before he could embark upon it, and for being finally instrumental in conferring the greatest boon that our world has received from any mortal man since Noah entered into the ark. BY THE GRACE OF GOD HE WAS WHAT HE WAS.