Through citron-groves and fields of yellow maize, Through plantain-walks where not a sunbeam plays. Here blue savannas fade into the sky; There forests frown in midnight majesty; Ceiba, and Indian fig, and plane sublime, Nature’s first-born, and reverenced by time! There sits the bird that speaks! there quivering rise Wings that reflect the glow of evening skies! Half bird, half fly, the fairy king of flowers, Reigns there, and revels through the fragrant bowers; Gem full of life, and joy, and song divine, Soon in the virgin’s graceful ear to shine. The poet sung, if ancient Fame speaks truth, “Come! follow, follow to the Fount of Youth! I quaff the ambrosial mists that round it rise, Dissolved and lost in dreams of Paradise!” And there called forth, to bless a happier hour, It met the sun in many a rainbow-shower! Murmuring delight, its living waters rolled ’Mid branching palms, and amaranths of gold! _Rogers._ It were an absurdity to say that they were _Christians_ who broke in upon this Elysian scene like malignant spirits, and made that vast continent one wide theatre of such havoc, insult, murder, and misery as never were before witnessed on earth. But it was not exactly in this island that this disgraceful career commenced. Lured by the rumour of gold, which he received from the natives, Columbus sailed southward first to Cuba, and thence to Hispaniola. Here he was visited by the cazique, Guacanahari, who was doomed first to experience the villany of the Spaniards. This excellent and kind man sent by the messengers which Columbus had despatched to wait on him, a curious mask of beaten gold, and when the vessel of Columbus was immediately afterwards wrecked in standing in to the coast, he appeared with all his people on the strand,—for the purpose of plundering and destroying them, as we might expect from _savages_, and as the Cazique would have been served had he been wrecked himself on the Spanish, or on our own coast at that time? No! but better Christian than most of those who bore that name, he came eagerly to do the very deed enjoined by Christ and his followers,—to succour and to save. “The prince,” says Herrera, their own historian, “appeared all zeal and activity at the head of his people. He placed armed guards to keep off the press of the natives, and to keep clear a space for the depositing of the goods as they came to land: he sent out as many as were needful in their canoes to put themselves under the guidance of the Spaniards, and to assist them all in their power in the saving of their goods from the wreck. As they brought them to land, he and his nobles received them, and set sentinels over them, not suffering the people even to gratify that curiosity which at such a crisis must have been very great, to examine and inspect the curious articles of a new people; and his subjects participating in all his feelings, wept tears of sincere distress for the sufferers,