OUR NORLAND.

BY CHARLES SANGSTER.

We have no Dryads in our woods,
No Fairies in the hills;
No Nereids in the crystal floods,
Nor Undines in the rills;
No jolly Satyrs, such as he

The gentle Spenser found
In that rare dream of chivalry
With which his Muse is crown'd;

No sacred Fauns, no Druid Oaks,
No sylvan Deities;

No Ouphs to hold along the brooks
Their midnight revelries;
No Ogres guarding castle keeps,
No Witches wild and lean,
No crafty Syrens from the deeps,
Nor Genii from the green;

No mellow-throated Nightingales,
Drowsing the wilds with song,
While echo wakes through all the vales
The sweet notes to prolong;
No Larks, at heaven's coral gate
To celebrate the morn
In fiery strains, and passionate
Wild bursts of lyric scorn ;·

But we have birds of plumage bright,
And warblers in our woods,
Whose hearts are well-springs of delight,
Whose haunts the solitudes -
The dim, untrodden wilderness,

Where wildness reigns supreme;
God's solemn temple none the less
Than some stupendous dream;

Vast e'en beyond the thought of man,
Magnificently grand;
Coeval with the first rough plan
From Nature's artist-hand;
Deep within deep, and wild on wild,
In savage roughness rolled;
Grandeur on grandeur heaped and piled
Through lusty days of old.

The lofty cape, the stern-brow'd peak,
Round which the mists are curl'd,
As if Nature gave us, in some freak,
The freedom of the world.
Broad inland seas and lovely lakes
Their tributes seaward pour;
And cataracts whose thunder shakes
The granite-belted shore.

The rugged oak, the regal pine,

Our woodland monarchs these,

Round which the kingliest garlands twine For countless centuries.

Their reign was from the days of eld,
Their hosts were mighty peers,
Who fought and fell, as time compelled,
The battle of the years.

How great the forest heroes are
That stand on every hill!
How have they scoffed at scathe and scar,
And scorned each threatening ill!
Knew we their chronicles of fame,
The record of their deeds,

They'd crowd us from the scroll, and shame
Our catalogue of creeds.

We have no feudal castles old,
Like eyries perched on high,
Whence issue knights and barons bold,
To ravage and destroy;

But we've the remnant of a race
As bold, as brave as they,
Whether in battle or the chase
The Red Men of to-day.

How brave, how great, in days of yore,
Their scanty legends tell;

The soul, an hunger'd, craves for more,
But, lo! beneath the swell
Of Time's resistless, onward roll

The unwritten secrets lie,

No voice from out the distant goal,
No answer but a sigh.

For Time, like some old miser, keeps
The record of the tribes,

And will not yield it from the deeps
For promises or bribes.

What matchless Chiefs, what Sachems gray,
What multitudes of Braves !

But what remains of these to-day?

A continent of graves!

And in their stead the Old World pours Her streams of living men—

Her hearts of oak - along our shores,

To people hill and glen;

To battle through a nation's youth,

Until by Heaven's grace
We rise in Freedom and in Truth,
Another British race.

Stand up, then, in thy youthful pride,
O nation yet to be,

And wed this great land to its bride,
The broad Atlantic sea;
Fling out Britannia's flag above
Our heaven-born endeavour,
One chain of waves
Uniting us for ever!

-one chain of love

- Bentley's Miscellany.

KINGSTON, C.W.

THE "MISSION" OF RICHARD COBDEN.

BY LORD HOBART.

IT is long since there left the world any one who deserved so well of it as Richard Cobden. To say this is indeed, in one sense, to say but little. For the acts of those who have had it in their power to influence the destinies of mankind, mankind has in general small reason to be grateful. In account with humanity, the public characters have been few indeed who could point with satisfaction to the credit side. But of Cobden's career there are results which none can gainsay. Vast, signal, and comprehensive, they disarm alike both competition and criticism. The two great triumphs of his life were the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Commercial Treaty with France. Of these, the first gave food to starving millions, redressed a gigantic and intolerable abuse of political power, saved an empire from revolutionary convulsion, and imparted new and irresistible impulse to material progress throughout the world; the second carried still further the work which the first had begun, insured, sooner or later, its full consummation, and fixed, amidst the waves of conflicting passions and jarring interests, deep in the tenacious ground of commercial sympathy, a rock for the foot of Peace.

But, though Cobden's public life is admired by most Englishmen, its real scope and nature are understood by very few. The prophet was not without honour, but he was almost entirely without comprehension, in his own country. Being asked on one occasion to take part in some project of interest or pleasure he declined on the ground that he had a "mission." What, then, was the "mission" of which he spoke? What was his distinctive character as a public man? The prevalent notion entertained respecting him among well-educated Englishmen is that he was the apostle of Free Trade, with a strong and rather dangerous tendency towards democracy and cheap government, and a disposition to peace at any price on account of the costliness of war. It was reserved for foreigners to appreciate the greatest Englishman of his time, and for a foreigner to describe him justly. He repealed the Corn Laws; he fought and triumphed for Free Trade; he advocated peace; he deprecated national extravagance; and broke a lance, when occasion occurred, for political liberty. But these acts of his were but means to an end; illustrative of and subservient to the great

It is strange, but it is true, that there had been no international men of any note before his time. For what is internationalism? Suppose a community which, from whatever cause, was without laws or government of any kind. In such a community every man would be the guardian of his own rights and interests, and compelled to bear arms, offensive and defensive, to maintain them. Bloodshed and every kind of misery, the hideous brood of anarchy, would abound. The state of affairs, even among savages, would be intolerable; and it would not be long before some one would propose the natural and obvious remedy-political institutions. Suppose further (the case is conceivable) that the proposal was met with contempt on account of its alleged impracticability. Suppose that it appeared, or was asserted, that there was such an utter dissimilarity of views and feelings, such an intense individuality, in the different members of the community, that the attempt to unite them under any form of government or any regular system of law was hopeless. Suppose, nevertheless, the author of the proposal to persevere. Suppose him to contend that the alleged objection to it had no foundation in reality, but was the offspring, rightly considered, of mere prejudice and error; that if men were, as they affirmed, thus self-centred, dissimilar, and antagonistic, they ought not to be so; and that, if the evil was real, the remedy rested with themselves. Suppose him to represent that if they were sensible men they would mitigate for the common good the intensity of their individualism; that if they were Christians political intercourse with each other should be a pleasure and not a pain. Imagine him to urge that for the sake of a mere sentiment, puerile, barbarous, and eminently pagan, they were deliberately impoverishing themselves, and leading a life proper to wild beasts rather than to men; that for the sake of a prejudice against each other the result of deep-rooted habit, they were content to live in a condition of constant anxiety and suffering, diversified with occasional outbreaks of violence and bloodshed; and that while they bitterly complained of the cost, physical and mental, of such a state of existence, they were ready to endure it rather than abandon the precious possession of individuality, self-concentration, and self-dependence, handed down

to them by their ancestors, with all its train of selfishness, jealousy, reciprocal animosity, and mutual misunderstanding, and which by some strange hallucination they were accustomed to look upon as a good rather than an evil. Suppose all this, and you have supposed a case which actually exists. For the community of nations is a community precisely such as has been described; internationalism, in its ultimate scope and full development, is the doctrine supposed to be taught and rejected; and the teacher of that doctrine is the international man. Is it not strange, then, that Cobden should have been the first to teach it? still more strange that he should have been treated by the influential classes in his own country as a man who-well-meaning, no doubt, and eminently successful in his line -was yet hovering on the verge of lunacy?

Time out of mind the individuals of which the community of nations is composed have been willing to live as no other community could live - without a polity and without laws.* Of the terrible evils which result, one, though possibly not the greatest, is war. This evil is so vast and conspicuous that it shocks and sickens humane men; and nothing is more common than to hear discussions on the question whether or not war is lawful. But if war is unlawful, then, in the case just supposed, of a community consisting of individual persons, it is unlawful for each of them to protect his own rights in the absence of any government to protect them; a doctrine which no one possessed of common sense will be found to maintain. The natural and necessary result of international anarchy is war, just as the natural and necessary result of national anarchy is personal violence. But war is not, because international anarchy is not, † an inevitable condition of human affairs. War is, because international anarchy is, excusable enough as between barbarous communities. But among civilized and enlightened nations war is, because anarchy is, a scandal and a shame. It is this evil - this anarchy of nations which has wrought more misery and prevented more happiness than perhaps any other of the self-inflicted torments of humanity. It is an evil which is as grave in its negative as in its positive aspect; which has cursed the world, not only by

It need hardly be said that "International Law," which there are no established tribunals to administer and no means which can be relied on to

enforce, is not law in the ordinary sense of the word.

no maintenance of standing armies, this and the

drenching it with blood and letting loose upon it the foulest and fiercest passions, but by placing between the human mind and the intellectual and moral improvement resulting from the political and social intercourse of human beings an impassable barrier. But instead of being treated as a calamity of this hideous complexion, it is habitually looked upon with complacency and self-gratulation. In the opinion of the generality of men, this absence of political intercourse between nations is a happy disposition of Providence, which it would be impious in human creatures to disturb. The class of persons in this country who sing "Rule Britannia" experience in doing so a thrill of conscious virtue, and a comfortable sense of duty done which confirms them in the practice. The Frenchman with his gloire and his grande nation feels elevated in the moral scale when he sings their praise. That which the world has wept in tears of blood, and but for which it would have worn an aspect, compared with that which it now wears, of perfect felicity, is treated as a subject for honest rejoicing to good citizens - for British jollification or French fanfarronade. If these men were heathens, there would be more to be said for them; though one might have thought that improved means of education and advancing intelligence would have taught even to paganism, that the self-isolation of nationsthe self-imposed and obstinately-maintained severance of man from man, because they happen to be of a different race, or to have a different political historyevil to be danced and sung about, but a calamity to be deplored. Being Christians, it is difficult to understand their error. Christianity cut the knot which intellectual advancement would sooner or later have untied, and if it taught anything, taught this, that simply because they belong to a different race, or are geographically divided from them, men have no right to treat other men as socially and politically distinct from themselves; that the mutual estrangement, social and political, of members of the great human family, is an evil of the same nature as the mutual estrangement of children born of the same parent; and that the exclusive regard of men for those with whom they are classed by the accidents of origin or of soil is a moral delinquency of the gravest kind. Be it remembered by those who meet, as they imagine triumphantly, considerations such as these with the words " Utopian" and "visionary" (words by which it may be remarked that every innovation in

was not an