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]