Set between many
seas, it rested upon the Mediterranean, possessed harbors on the German
Ocean, and embraced within its wide shores and jutting headlands, the
bays and open, waters of the Atlantic; its people, infolding at one
extreme the offspring of colonists from Greece, and at the other,
the hardy children of the Northmen, were called, as it were, to the
inheritance of life upon the sea. The nation, too, readily conceived or
appropriated great ideas, and delighted in bold resolves. Its travellers
had penetrated farthest into the fearful interior of unknown lands;
its missionaries won most familiarly the confidence of the aboriginal
hordes; its writers described with keener and wiser observation the
forms of nature in her wildness, and the habits and languages of savage
man; its soldiers,--and every lay Frenchman in America owed military
service,--uniting beyond all others celerity with courage, knew best how
to endure the hardships of forest life and to triumph in forest warfare.
Its ocean chivalry had given a name and a colony to Carolina, and its
merchants a people to Acadia. The French discovered the basin of the
St. Lawrence; were the first to explore and possess the banks of the
Mississippi, and planned an American empire that should unite the widest
valleys and most copious inland waters of the world.
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