"Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four 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 become one of the commonplaces 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 will, perhaps, acknowledge the old conjunction of the prophetic character with that of the poet to have again taken place."[16] The vates of the Romans was poet and prophet; and such was Berkeley.
The sentiment which prompted the prophetic verses of the good Bishop was widely diffused; or, perhaps, it was a natural prompting.[17] Of this an illustration is afforded in the life of Benjamin West. On his visit to Rome in 1760, the young artist encountered a famous improvvisatore, who, on 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 America had been raised from the deep would be manifest, he hailed the youth before him as an instrument of Heaven to raise there a taste for those 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:—
"But all things of heavenly origin, like the glorious sun, move westward; and truth and art have their periods of shining and of night. Rejoice then, O venerable Rome, in thy divine destiny; for though darkness overshadow thy seats, and though thy mitred head must descend into the dust, thy spirit immortal and undecayed already spreads towards a new world."[18]
John Adams, in his old age; dwelling on the reminiscences of early life, records that nothing was "more ancient in his memory than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had travelled westward, and in conversation it was always added, since he was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America." With the assistance of an octogenarian neighbor, he recalled a couplet that had been repeated with rapture as long as he could remember:—
"The Eastern nations sink, their glory ends,
And empire rises where the sun descends."
It was imagined by his neighbor that these lines came from some of our early pilgrims,—by whom they had been "inscribed, or rather drilled, into a rock on the shore of Monument Bay in our old Colony of Plymouth."[19]
Another illustration of this same sentiment will be found in Burnaby's "Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America, in 1759 and 1760," a work which was first published in 1775. In his reflections at the close of his book the traveller thus remarks:—
"An idea, strange as it is visionary, has entered into the minds of the generality of mankind, that empire is travelling westward: and every one is looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give the law to the rest of the world."[20]
The traveller is none the less an authority for the prevalence of this sentiment because he declares it "illusory and fallacious," and records his conviction that "America is formed for happiness, but not for empire." Happy America! What empire can compare with happiness! But, to make amends for this admission, the jealous traveller, in his edition of 1796, after the adoption of our Constitution, announces that "the present union of American States will not be permanent, or last for any considerable length of time," and "that that extensive country must necessarily be divided into separate states and kingdoms."[21] Thus far the Union has stood against all shocks, foreign or domestic; and the prophecy of Berkeley is more than ever in the popular mind.