It is pleasant to think that Berkeley, whose beautiful verses
predicting the future of America are so often quoted, was so sweet and
charming a character. Atterbury said of him: “So much understanding,
so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility I did not
think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw this
gentleman.”[295] Swift said: “He is an absolute philosopher with regard
to money, titles, and power.”[296] Pope let drop a tribute which can
never die:--
“To Berkeley every virtue under Heaven.”[297]
Such a person was naturally a seer.
He is compendiously called an Irish prelate and philosopher. Born in
the County of Kilkenny, 1684, and dying in Oxford, 1753, he began as
a philosopher. While still young, he wrote his famous treatise on
“The Principles of Human Knowledge,” where he denies the existence of
matter, insisting that it is only an impression produced on the mind
by Divine power. After travel for several years on the Continent,
and fellowship with the witty and learned at home, among whom were
Addison, Swift, Pope, Garth, and Arbuthnot, he conceived the project of
educating the aborigines of America, which was set forth in a tract,
published in 1725, entitled “A Proposal for the better Supplying of
Churches in our Foreign Plantations, and for Converting the Savage
Americans to Christianity, by a College to be erected in the Summer
Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda.” Persuaded by his
benevolence, the Minister[298] promised twenty thousand pounds, and
there were several private subscriptions, to promote what was called
by the King “so pious an undertaking.” Berkeley possessed already
a deanery in Ireland, worth eleven hundred pounds a year. Turning
away from this residence, and refusing to be tempted by an English
mitre, offered by the Queen, he set sail for Rhode Island, “which lay
nearest to Bermuda,” where, after a tedious passage of more than four
months, he arrived 23d January, 1729. Here he lived on a farm back
of Newport, having been, according to his own report, “at very great
expense in purchasing land and stock.”[299] In familiar letters he
has recorded his impression of this place, famous since for fashion.
“The climate,” he says, “is like that of Italy, and not at all colder
in the winter than I have known it everywhere north of Rome.… This
island is pleasantly laid out in hills and vales and rising grounds,
hath plenty of excellent springs and fine rivulets, and many delightful
landscapes of rocks and promontories and adjacent islands.… The town of
Newport contains about six thousand souls, and is the most thriving,
flourishing place in all America for its bigness. It is very pretty,
and pleasantly situated. I was never more agreeably surprised than at
the first sight of the town and its harbor.”[300] He seems to have
been contented, and when his companions went to Boston stayed at home,
“preferring,” as he wrote, “quiet and solitude to the noise of a great
town, notwithstanding all the solicitations that have been used to draw
us thither.”[301]
The money he had expected, especially from the King’s ministers,
failed, and after waiting in vain expectation two years and a half,
he returned to England, leaving an infant daughter buried in the
churchyard of Trinity, and bestowing upon Yale College a library of
eight hundred and eighty volumes, as well as his estate in Rhode
Island. During his residence at Newport he preached every Sunday,
and was indefatigable in pastoral duties, besides meditating, if not
composing, “The Minute Philosopher,” which was published shortly after
his return.
In his absence he had not been forgotten at home; and shortly after
his return he became Bishop of Cloyne, in which place he was most
exemplary, devoting himself to his episcopal duties, to the education
of his children, and the pleasures of composition.
It was while occupied with his plan of a college, especially as a
nursery for the colonial churches, shortly before sailing for America,
that the great future was revealed to him, and he wrote the famous
poem, the only one found among his works, entitled “Verses on the
Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.”[302] The date may
be fixed at 1726. Such a poem was an historic event. I give the first
and last stanzas.
“The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime
Barren of every glorious theme,
_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:--
“_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_.”[306]
John Adams, in his old age, dwelling on the reminiscences of early
life, records that nothing in his reading 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 which he had heard repeated “for more than sixty years”:--
“The Eastern nations sink, their glory ends,
And empire rises where the sun descends.”
The tradition was, as his neighbor had heard it, 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 [Manomet] Bay in
our Old Colony of Plymouth.”[307]
Another illustration of this same sentiment is found in Burnaby’s
“Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America, in 1759 and
1760,” a work first published in 1775. In reflections at the close the
traveller 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 law to the rest of the world_.”[308]
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? Making
amends for this admission, the jealous traveller, in his edition of
1798, after the adoption of the National Constitution, announces “that
the present union of the 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.”[309]
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.