s own pocket the subscription-list that
was raised to further Berkeley's schemes; {295} who actually succeeded
in touching the callous organism which the Elector of Hanover and King
of England called a heart; and whose one joy on hearing of the Vanessa
legacy was at the aid it afforded to his voyage and his pure, unselfish
aspirations. Bermuda ever remained a vision for him; but in 1728 he
set sail for Rhode Island in the company of his young wife, Miss Anne
Forster, whom, as he quaintly tells us, he chose "for her qualities of
mind and her unaffected inclination to books." For more than three
years he dwelt in America a simple, happy, earnest life. But the
mission was a failure. To Robert Walpole, Berkeley's plans and hopes
would naturally seem about as deserving of the attention and aid of
practical men as the ambitions of Don Quixote. The grant promised by
the Government was never sent out, and in 1731 Berkeley came back to
England. How many of those who are familiar with the line, "Westward
the course of empire takes its way," which has been accepted as the
motto for one of the best and best-known frescos that adorn the Capitol
in Washington, know that it comes from the last verse of a poem which
Berkeley wrote as he was striving to realize a New Atlantis in Rhode
Island?

"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."

Two years of literary and philosophic life in London succeeded to the
Rhode Island idyl. In 1734 he returned to Ireland for the last time,
and dwelt for eighteen years in his bishopric of Cloyne in studious
seclusion with his family, wandering among the myrtle-hedges his own
hand planted, reading Plato and Hooker, teaching his cherished
daughter, suffering from domestic losses, and proclaiming to an
astounded world that tar-water was a panacea for all human ills.
Berkeley's genius and his eloquent prose made tar-water as popular as
both had {296} made Bermuda some twenty years earlier. The later years
of his life at Cloyne are tinged with melancholy. His mind began to be
agitated anew with the dream of an academic retreat by other streams
than the Blackwater and the Leo, and in 1752 he journeyed again to
England and set up his tent for the last time beneath the shadow of the
Oxford spires. It was mellow autumn when he came to the City of
Scholars. In the chill