It is truly melancholy, however, to contemplate the wretched equipment, for which the most powerful princess of Christendom was ready to pledge her jewels. Floating castles will soon be fitted out to convey the miserable natives of Africa to the golden shores of America; towering galleons will be despatched to bring home the guilty treasures to Spain. But three small vessels, one of which was without a deck, and neither of them, probably, exceeding the capacity of a pilot-boat, and even these impressed into the public service, composed the expedition fitted out under royal patronage, to realize that magnificent conceptions in which the creative mind of Columbus had planted the germs of a new world. No chapter of romance equals the interest of this expedition. The most fascinating of the works of fiction which have issued from the modern press have, to my taste, no attraction compared with the pages in which the first voyage of Columbus is described by Robertson, and still more by our own Irving and Prescott, the last two enjoying the advantage over the Scottish historian of possessing the lately discovered Journals and letters of Columbus himself. The departure from Palos, where, a few days before, he had begged a morsel of bread and a cup of water for his wayworn child,--his final farewell to the Old World at the Canaries,--his entrance upon the trade winds, which then, for the first time, filled a European sail,--the portentous variation of the needle, never before observed, the fearful course westward and westward, day after day, and night after night, over the unknown ocean, the mutinous and ill-appeased crew; at length, when hope had turned to despair in every heart but one, the tokens of land,--the cloud-banks on the western horizon,--the logs of drift-wood,--the fresh shrub, floating with its leaves and berries,--the flocks of land-birds,--the shoals of fish that inhabit shallow water, the indescribable smell of the shore,--the mysterious presentiment that seems ever to go before a great event, and finally, on that ever-memorable night of the 12th of October, 1492, the moving light seen by the sleepless eye of the great discoverer himself, from the deck of the Santa Maria, and in the morning the real, undoubted land, swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men;--these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our Continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines the flickering taper. E. Everett. LXXXV. ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.