Tribute to Cortez (only excelled by Caesar) in May 1852

The August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border holds up Cortez (Hernán Cortés) as the model hero. As suggested in previous posts here and here, Cortez is recalled in the prairie talk of August 1852 as a great champion of belief and enthusiasm. This association of Cortez with enthusiasm intriguingly corresponds to Melville's enthusiast hero Pierre and the main theme of his poem "The Enthusiast."

I forgot about this riff on Cortez in another, earlier installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border:

But the prairie does not always charm the eye or the imagination: often its sameness and the monotony of slow motion, lull us to dreamy thought, then, happily, we create of solitude, a world of our own; or people it with the loved absent, or the long dead. To-day, by an easy association, I dreamed of the old warrior explorers from Spain—'ere her glory died—of De Soto Cortez, and others. Hernando Cortez! What a name is there! What hero of antiquity excelled him? None but Caesar: his military genius resembled Alexander's; but—as in the comparison of our Washington with the world's Captains with an allowance for the scale of action and of means. (His passage of the Delaware and subsequent campaign gave indications of what he might have done!) The master-stroke of the career of Cortez, was his desperate march to Vera Cruz, his attack and defeat of the braggart Narvaez and his vastly superior numbers. Truly, his were enthusiastic genius, energy and constancy, beyond all proportion to what Providence implants or requires in man in ordinary times. In the world's story, among all wondrous events, in Mexico alone History and Romance form an unity. And Cortez, like Columbus, was self-made; he forced his way over great obstacles, with which that age heaped the paths of aspirants from the low classes.
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, May 1852; and Scenes and Adventures)

 

Columbus ended earth's romance:
No New World to mankind remains!" (Clarel)