acter 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