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. SAMUEL SEWALL, 1697-1727. Berkeley saw the sun of empire travelling westward. A contemporary whose home was made in New England, Samuel Sewall, saw the New Heaven and the New Earth. He was born at Bishop-Stoke, England, 28th March, 1652, and died at Boston, 1st January, 1730. A child emigrant in 1661, he became a student and graduate of our Cambridge; in 1692, Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts; in 1718, Chief Justice. He was of the court which condemned the witches, but afterwards, standing up before the congregation of his church, made public confession of error, and his secret diary bears testimony to his trial of conscience. In harmony with this contrition was his early feeling for the enslaved African, as witness his tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” so that he may be called the first of our Abolitionists. Besides an “Answer to Queries respecting America,” in 1690, and “Proposals touching the Accomplishment of Prophecies,” in 1713, he wrote another work, with the following title:-- “Phænomena quædam Apocalyptica ad Aspectum Novi Orbis configurata: Or, Some Few Lines towards a Description of the New Heaven as it makes to those who stand upon the New Earth. By Samuel Sewall, A. M., and sometime Fellow of Harvard College at Cambridge in New England.” The copy before me is the second edition, with the imprint, “Massachuset, Boston. Printed by Bartholomew Green, and sold by Benjamin Eliot, Samuel Gerrish, and Daniel Henchman. 1727.” There is a prophetic voice even in the title, which promises “some few lines towards a description of the New Heaven as it makes to those who stand upon the New Earth.” This is followed by verses from the Scriptures, among which is Isaiah, xi. 14: “But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west”; also, Acts, i. 8: “Ye shall be witnesses unto me unto the uttermost part of the earth,”--quoting here from the Spanish Bible, “_hasta lo ultimo de la tierra_.” Two different Dedications follow,--the first dated “Boston, N. E., April 16th, 1697.” Here are words on the same key with the title:--