Lawrence. The discovery of the gold mines brought new and unimagined
possibilities of wealth to the Old World, while the imagination of
Europe, bounded since the beginning of recorded time by the Western
ocean, and with the Mediterranean as its centre, shot out to the romance
and mystery of untried seas.
It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the profound and
stirring influence of such an alteration on thought and literature. To
the men at the end of the fifteenth century scarcely a year but brought
another bit of received and recognized thinking to the scrap-heap;
scarcely a year but some new discovery found itself surpassed and in its
turn discarded, or lessened in significance by something still more new.
Columbus sailed westward to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a
more expeditious one to "the Indies"; the name West Indies still
survives to show the theory on which the early discoverers worked. The
rapidity with which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of
the maps of the day. In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic
perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue island
off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were discovered and the
name fastened on to one of the islands of that archipelago.
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