This fever struck chivalrous Spain, and no leader could have been found more imbued with the spirit than Hernando Cortez, and it was with this spirit that he entered Mexico—to win gold for his crown and the country for his church. Iconoclasm was his creed, gold his desire, and fire and the sword his argument. When he entered the sanctuaries of their temples, and offered the sacerdotal official the image of the Virgin, in an unknown tongue, as a substitute for their tutelary divinities, on their inability to comprehend his motives, he invariably overturned their altars, broke their idols, and, with the assumption of a man ordained by Jehovah, invoked the saints to let them be anathema maranatha. No cataclysm of nature since the destruction of Atlantis has been so blighting to the growth of a nation, or so completely annihilating to their past history, as the Spanish Conquest of the New World. Tenochtitlan, the mistress who demanded tribute of all Mexico, has vanished, and the Modern Mexico, phœnix-like, soars aloft with outstretched wings, and hovers over the earth with her music, then sinks with the last sad notes of the dying swan, to immolate herself, that she may rise from her ashes, to rise higher and sing clearer. A Catholic cathedral occupies the place of the Teocalli, but at what cost! Ten thousand souls without the knowledge of an Evangel; the canals of the New World Venice turned into a Golgotha; the beautiful lake of Tezcuco turned into a salt marsh, the hanging gardens and fountains of princes into cactus beds, and the history of a people blotted from the face of the earth! The modern traveler, as he looks at the changed scenes in the Valley of Mexico, may truthfully say: “Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand Signed in thy spoil, and crimsoned in thy lethe.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ III. The Mound-builders in Central America. ────── “Thou unrelenting Past! Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain— And fetters, sure and fast, Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign. “Far in thy realm withdrawn, Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom; And glorious ages gone, Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb. “Full many a mighty name Lurks in thy depth, unuttered, unrevered: With thee are silent fame, Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappeared.”