"Now, my dear little fellow," he said, "here is a blank check, which you may fill up while I am away, for as much of that as you may want."
Moore, who declined the offer, as he declined many others of like nature, might well comment on a man's "bringing back the warmth of friendship so unchilled after an absence of five years." Nor was that the end of it. In 1814 Douglas, then Admiral on the Jamaica Station, offered Moore the Secretaryship, "in case of war a sure fortune," with a house and land to be at the poet's disposal; and, as Moore notes, the offer was not only friendly but courageous, for Douglas owed his appointment to Court interest, and at that moment the Whig satirist was in the worst odour with the Regent and all his surroundings.
The immediate boon, gladly accepted, of the passage from Bermuda to America, and thence to England, was the more important, as it enabled Moore to devote the money, which had been set aside for his passage, to seeing the New World. He sailed from New York to Norfolk, and thence set out for Baltimore; and the journey in American stage coaches appears to have shaken out of him whatever remained of his early illusions about the "land of the free." America at that time was beyond dispute inchoate, amorphous, and ugly in all senses, and Moore's instincts were anything but democratic. At Philadelphia, "the only place in America which can boast of any literary society," he found his writings well known, and met with a flattering reception, which pleased him; a Mrs. Hopkinson in particular showed him attentions which elicited the poem, "Alone by the Schuylkill a wanderer roved." Returning to New York, he found that the _Boston_ must go to Halifax, and could not sail before August. This offered an opportunity of journeying to Canada overland, and accordingly he sailed up the Hudson River, through "the most bewildering succession of romantic objects that I could ever have conceived." The Oneida Indians charmed him by their courtesy, the rivers and virgin forests wrought upon his sensibilities, and when he came within hearing of the roar of Niagara, it seemed to him dreadful that "any heart born for sublimities should be doomed to breathe away its hours amidst the miniature productions of this world without seeing what shapes Nature can assume, what wonders God _can_ give birth to."