The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

"A friend of mine, Cyrus Field, of New York, is the Columbus of our time, for after no less than forty voyages across the Atlantic, in pursuit of the great aim of his life, he has at length, by his cable, moored the New World close alongside the Old." Nor was this mere rhetoric, a burst of extravagance, to which an orator might give way in the excitement of a public occasion; it was a comparison which he repeated on many occasions, though slightly varied in expression. Mr. G. W. Smalley, the well-known correspondent of the New York Tribune, in writing from London, on the very day that Mr. Field was carried to his grave, recalls how he heard it from Mr. Bright's own lips. He says: "The great orator spoke of the great American in terms which he did not bestow lavishly, and never bestowed carelessly. His respect for Mr. Field's public work was sufficiently shown in the splendid eulogy which he passed upon him. To be called by such a man as Mr. Bright the Columbus of the Nineteenth Century is renown enough for any man. The epithet is imperishable. It is, as Thackeray said of a similar tribute to Fielding in Gibbon, like having your name written on the dome of St. Peter's. The world knows it and the world remembers. I heard Mr. Bright use the phrase, and he adorned and emphasized it in his noblest tones."