He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.
Raleigh, the discoverer of Virginia, was Spenser’s special friend, his “Shepherd of the Ocean,” the patron under whose advice the poet visited England with the first instalment of the Epic, which he dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, “to live with the eternity of her Fame.” Yet it is obvious that to Spenser’s fancy this western continent was then scarcely more substantial than his own Faerie land. In truth it was still almost as much a world apart as if Raleigh and his adventurous crew had sailed up the blue vault of heaven, and brought back the story of another planet on which it had been their fortune to alight.
Nor had such fancies wholly vanished long after the voyage across the Atlantic had become a familiar thing. It was in 1723 that the philosophical idealist, Berkeley,—afterwards Bishop of Cloyne,—formulated a more definite and yet not less visionary Utopia than that of Sir Thomas More. He was about to organise “among the English in our Western plantations” a seminary which was designed to train the young American savages, make them Masters of Arts, and fit instruments for the regeneration of their own people; while the new Academy was to accomplish no less for the reformation of manners and morals among his own race. In his fancy’s choice he gave a preference, at first for Bermuda, or the Summer Islands, as the site of his college; and “presents the bright vision of an academic home in those fair lands of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, from which Christian civilisation might be made to radiate over this vast continent with its magnificent possibilities in the future history of the race of man.” It was while his mind was preoccupied with this fine ideal “of planting Arts and Learning in America” that he wrote the well-known lines:—
There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts;
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay:
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,