The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book Part 35

What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea what it is. In a short sentence it may be summed up to be the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable.

If you go into war now, you will have more banners to decorate your cathedrals and churches. Englishmen will fight now as well as they ever did; and there is ample power to back them, if the country can be but sufficiently excited and deluded. You may raise up great generals. You may have another Wellington, and another Nelson, too; for this country can grow men capable of every enterprise. Then there may be t.i.tles, and pensions, and marble monuments to eternize the men who have thus become great;--but what becomes of you, and your country, and your children?

You profess to be a Christian nation. You make it your boast even--though boasting is somewhat out of place in such questions--you make it your boast that you are a Christian people, and that you draw your rule of doctrine and practice, as from a well pure and undefiled, from the lively oracles of G.o.d, and from the direct revelation of the Omnipotent. You have even conceived the magnificent project of illuminating the whole earth, even to its remotest and darkest recesses, by the dissemination of the volume of the New Testament, in whose every page are written for ever the words of peace. Within the limits of this island alone, every Sabbath-day, twenty thousand, yes, far more than twenty thousand temples are thrown open, in which devout men and women a.s.semble to wors.h.i.+p Him who is the "Prince of Peace."

Is this a reality? or is your Christianity a romance, and your profession a dream? No; I am sure that your Christianity is not a romance, and I am equally sure that your profession is not a dream. It is because I believe this that I appeal to you with confidence, and that I have hope and faith in the future. I believe that we shall see, and at no very distant time, sound economic principles spreading much more widely amongst the people; a sense of justice growing up in a soil which hitherto has been deemed unfruitful; and--which will be better than all--the churches of the United Kingdom, the churches of Britain, awaking as it were from their slumbers, and girding up their loins to more glorious work, when they shall not only accept and believe in the prophecy, but labour earnestly for its fulfilment, that there shall come a time--a blessed time--a time which shall last for ever--when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

John Bright

THE HOMES OF ENGLAND

The stately homes of England!

How beautiful they stand, Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O'er all the pleasant land!

The deer across their greensward bound, Through shade and sunny gleam: And the swan glides past them with the sound Of some rejoicing stream.

The merry homes of England!

Around their hearths by night, What gladsome looks of household love Meet in the ruddy light!

There woman's voice flows forth in song, Or childhood's tale is told, Or lips move tunefully along Some glorious page of old.

The blessed homes of England!

How softly on their bowers Is laid the holy quietness That breathes from Sabbath hours!

Solemn, yet sweet, the church-bell's chime Floats through their woods at morn; All other sounds, in that still time, Of breeze and leaf are born.

The cottage homes of England!

By thousands on her plains, They are smiling o'er the silvery brooks, And round the hamlet fanes.

Through glowing orchards forth they peep, Each from its nook of leaves; And fearless there the lowly sleep, As the bird beneath the eaves.

The free, fair homes of England!

Long, long, in hut and hall, May hearts of native proof be reared To guard each hallowed wall!

And green for ever be the groves, And bright the flowery sod, Where first the child's glad spirit loves Its country and its G.o.d!

Felicia Hemans

TO A WATER-FOWL

Whither, midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,-- The desert and illimitable air,-- Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned, At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere, Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end; Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend, Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone; the abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright.

Bryant

THE FASCINATION OF LIGHT

The strange fascination of light takes hold of all animated creatures, and commands a subtle devotion that cannot be set forth in a confession of faith. The delight of a boy in a bonfire is a breath of the heaven that is about us in our infancy. Though it be but a heap of rubbish, revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-wors.h.i.+p of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks break into glowing coals, darting out new tongues of flame to lick up the escaping embers!

Fire is one of nature's universal fascinations. The wildest and most wary animals approach and gaze at it in the night, and though it sometimes warns them off, it always holds them by a spell. The night migrating birds perish in scores against the plate-gla.s.s of coast lighthouses, swerving from the control of the all-powerful migratory instinct toward the fascinating glare that is their destruction. It is not sportsmanlike to hang a lantern in the marsh and shoot the duck that gather under it. But the night, the silent marsh, and the lantern have charms that the sportsman, with his legal and mechanical paraphernalia, can never understand. Fish are devoted fire-wors.h.i.+ppers, and that boy who has never speared by a jack-light is an object of compa.s.sion.

The earth and the waters under the earth have no more fascinating sight than the gray, silent form of a pike, moving and motionless in the shallow water, a shadow more tangible than himself thrown by a jack-light on the mottled yellow rocks and sands of the bottom. A pa.s.sing breath of wind, even the slightest motion of the punt, breaks every shadow and indentation into myriad fleeting ripples and waves of light, transforming the slender, silent fish into a sheaf of wriggling glimmers. With the stilling of the surface, the waiting pike and all the shadows and lights of the bottom grow once more still and distinct.

There floats the greatest cannibal of the fishes, paying his devotion to the flame, and above him stands the greatest cannibal of all created beings, pointing his deadly spear.

There is no moon. The stars cannot penetrate the thickening clouds. The bay is still and its sh.o.r.es invisible, the distant light of a farmhouse only serving to intensify the lonely silence. The savage joy of that moment repays the boy for all his laborious preparations. He brought two boards down the river from the mill, and toiled at them with all the tools in the woodshed till the ends and edges were made smooth. He collected lumber from all available sources for the ends and bottom, fastening them on with a miscellaneous collection of nails and springs.

Then he patiently picked an old piece of tarred rope into oak.u.m, and caulked it into the seams with a sharpened gate-hinge. He notched a pine tree, gathered the gum and boiled it into pitch to make the joints tight. That extraordinary pair of oars he sawed, chopped, and whittled from an old plank. The spear is a family relic which he dug up and fitted with a white-ash pole, and the anchor is a long stone, tied by the slack of a clothes-line. The jack is a basket made of old pail-hoops, and fastened to an upright stick to hold the burning pine knot. Yet we wonder why it is always the country boy who succeeds in the city!

Will he too, be lured by the seductive glimmer? Will he turn away from the conquest of nature and embark in the conquest of his fellow-mortals?

Will he go to a resort for his fis.h.i.+ng and a preserve for his shooting?

Will that bunch of hair protruding from under his hat be worn thin and gray in scrambling after the delights of the vain and the covetous? Will he devote his superb strength of body and mind to outstripping and circ.u.mventing his fellows in the pursuit of that transient glimmer, that all-alluring _ignis fatuus_ which the Babylon world calls success?

S. T. Wood

DAFFODILS

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that s.h.i.+ne And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of the bay; Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they Outdid the sparkling waves in glee; A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company; I gazed--and gazed--but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

Wordsworth