In distant lands now waits a better time,
Producing subjects worthy fame.
…
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.”
It is difficult to exaggerate the value of these verses, which have been so often quoted as to have become a commonplace of literature and politics. There is nothing from any oracle, there is very little from any prophecy, which can compare with them. The biographer of Berkeley, who wrote in the last century, was very cautious, when, after calling them “a beautiful copy of verses,” he says that “another age perhaps will acknowledge the old conjunction of the prophetic character with that of the poet to have again taken place.”[303] The vates of the Romans was poet and prophet; and such was Berkeley.
Mr. Webster calls this an “extraordinary prophecy,” and then says: “It was an intuitive glance into futurity; it was a grand conception, strong, ardent, glowing, embracing all time since the creation of the world and all regions of which that world is composed, and judging of the future by just analogy with the past. And the inimitable imagery and beauty with which the thought is expressed, joined to the conception itself, render it one of the most striking passages in our language.”[304]
The sentiment which prompted the prophetic verses of the excellent Bishop was widely diffused, or perhaps it was a natural prompting.[305] Of this illustration is afforded in the life of Benjamin West. On his visit to Rome in 1760, the young artist encountered a famous improvvisatore, who, learning that he was an American come to study the fine arts in Rome, at once addressed him with the ardor of inspiration, and to the music of his guitar. After singing the darkness which for so many ages veiled America from the eyes of Science, and also the fulness of time when the purposes for which this continent had been raised from the deep would be manifest, he hailed the youth before him as an instrument of Heaven to create there a taste for the arts which elevate man, and an assurance of refuge to science and knowledge, when, in the old age of Europe, they should have forsaken her shores. Then, in the spirit of prophecy, he sang:—