And his god was power; his demi-god, the man who, like Scythian Tamburlaine, lived-- "Threatening the world with high astounding terms And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword." There was no limit set to the enterprise of man's energy; his power was measureless and divine. Only in the realm of beauty his step might falter; beyond all achievement, and all the beauty of achievement, there would always hover-- "One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least Which into words no virtue can digest." Marlowe wrote intoxicated with this elixir of infinite possibility. The sea-dogs, men of action, seemed almost to be realizing his dreams, fighting the next ship that met them, like Drake always sailing a little further on, coming home with spoils and tales of wonder, and starting out in search of fresh adventures; or there were men like Frobisher, who combined the buccaneer with the spirit of the scientist, and who were anxious to learn new geographical facts; or men like Gilbert, who were serious-minded enough to be whole-hearted in the cause of science; or men like Ralegh, in whom all these elements seem to have been struggling. This paradise of unknown lands worked in all ways upon his mind. Not Columbus before him, not Balzac after him, realized more keenly the power of money. He saw, with Gilbert and the industrious Hakluyt, the value of geographical knowledge, but what fired his imagination was the vision of another Empire across the seas, and that vision he was impatient to realize. He inspired the painstaking Hakluyt, and he quietly made it his life's purpose to further the project. It was Ralegh who grasped the true meaning of the vague aspirations and whose personality was big enough to set the first slow forces at work. His immediate schemes failed, but without those initial failures Captain John Smith would never have succeeded, as he did succeed some fifteen years later, in founding the colony of Virginia, from which has at length grown, in the space of four hundred years, the present American nation. So are our dreams of Paradise materialized into fact. The attempt which Gilbert and Ralegh had made at colonization in 1578 had failed.