Earthly Paradises
Utopia, Sir Thomas More: the renewed idea of an island as the home of a high civilization. Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein, 1518.
Engraved title-page to Sylva Sylvarum, containing New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon, 1627. Bacon described a utopian land in the Pacific Ocean whose inhabitants came originally from Plato's Atlantis--situated, according to Bacon, in America.
Plate 10 of William Blake's America. A Prophecy, 1793, with his lines on the magnificence of the sunken Atlantic continent:
On those vast shady hills between America & Albion's shore,
Now barr'd out by the Atlantic sea, call'd Atlantean hills,
Because from their bright summits you may pass to the Golden world,
An ancient palace, archetype of mighty Emperies,
Rears its immortal pinnacles.