207
525

TALES.
At the Sign of the Pantuffel,

77 General, The
Adopted Child, An

152 Grey Romance, A
At the Sign of the Eagle,

264
All's Fair in Love,

437 Helgorn, The
At the Green Dragon : An Episode, 781

Incident, An, in the Career of the
Dancing Children, The, of Harri-

Rev. Luke Tremain,
combe,

401
Discipline,

634 Links and Chains,

661

.

725

465

Enign:a, An.

246 Rent Day,

336

Fifth Series, Volume LXXXIII.

}

No. 2557.- July 1 & 8, 1893.

{

From Beginning,
Vol. CXCVIII.

.

? 18

.

.

CONTENTS. I. THE CHATHAM ISLANDS AND THEIR STORY. By Henry O. Forbes,

Fortnightly Review, II. THE LAST DAYS OF AN EMPIRE,

Blackwood's Magazine,
III. ASPECTS OF TENNYSON. Tennyson as a

Nature-Poet. By Theodore Watts, Nineteenth Century,
IV. THE JOURNAL TO STELLA. By Austin
Dobson,

Longman's Magazine,
V. THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE ON RACE.
By J. W. Fortescue,

Nineteenth Century,
VI. WANDERERS. By a Son of the Marshes, . Macmillan's Magazine,

28

42

.

45

.

57

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Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

THE WANDERERS' RETURN.

What unlovely purpose lurks On a day a while ago,

In the czar's mind or the Turk's ; When the corn was newly carried,

What the sleepless Sphinx would say. And the late-come summer tarried

If she spoke upon a day ; For a glimpse of winter snow,

Whether Tiber ever dreams Verse of mine, in fashion slight,

Of his old imperial streams ; Chronicled the swallows' flight : 1

Whether English girls or Roman Many a month has gone since then,

Are the truer type of woman; And the land is green again.

And what Maid of Athens now

Fires a youthful poet's brow.
Though the cuckoo will not sing
Till he's very sure of spring,

These are things that move him not ; Tempted by this April sun

In so practical a bird Summer sends her vanguard on.

Much romancing were absurd ; Here they come with wheel and bound,

Here his heart is, on the spot. Flashing down and flying round,

He would like to know, no doubt, Twittering briskly as they fly,

When the hawthorns will be out, For a host of cares are theirs,

And the May-flies all about ; Family matters, nest affairs,

But the thoughts that please him best To be managed by and by.

Are about a certain nest, Since that fine September day,

Where he hopes, his mate and he, When they gathered on my roof,

Some domestic joys to see ; Swallow-wings have gone astray,

More important they than we ! Swallow-flights have held aloof,

Spectator.

GEORGE COTTERELL.

Far away.

Where the melon-orchards lie,
Where the golden orange-groves
Dip to sunny plains of sea,
Rise to domes of sapphire sky,
There the wandering swallow roves ;

THE MERRY MONTH.
England yields to Italy.

It was the merry month,

And the merry birds sang loud ; Happy were the fate, to follow

The wren was in the ivy-bush, Summer with the flying swallow ;

The lark was in the cloud. Happiest he, for though he roam,

In all that day of perfect May He is everywhere at home.

There seemed no power of ill, Here in England, who so well

When a hawk came sailing out of the Knows our life of field and town,

wood, Looks from closer quarters down

And all those songs grew still.
On our scheming,
On our dreaming,

It was the merry month,
Dwelling with us where we dwell ?

And the woods were full of glee, No ungenerous critic he ;

The lizard on its sunny bank, But a neighbor who perceives,

The squirrel upon the tree.. From beneath our very eaves,

In all that time of lusty prime More than other neighbors see,

There seemed no thought of death, Might embroil us with a word

When a snake came crawling out of a Were he not a friendly bird.

nook,

And fear held every breath..
Safer friend or more discreet
Surely it were hard to meet,

It was the merry month,
For in his unconscious keeping

And never was month more fair ;
Secrets of all lands are sleeping.

Lord Lovel is up in his lady's bower
Could he but his thoughts unravel, Singing with Lady Clare.
He might give us books of travel ; They sang it once, they sang. it twice,
Tell us how the world wags on

That song ; he seemed true lover;
In Bavarian Ratisbon ;

When a stinging word, like a blow wasi

heard,

Their “merry month" was over. 1 "An Autumn Flitting,” Spectator, October 3rd, 1891,

Spectator,

B.

THE CHATHAM ISLANDS AND THEIR

STORY.

a

ever

From The Fortnightly Review. with the world and civilization. The

journey occupies only about sixty hours,

but over the five hundred miles that I PROPOSE, in the following pages, to separate the two lands runs

a very give some account of a visit to the Chat-cross-sea, on which I can promise to bam Islands, a small archipelago in the any one longing for a life on the ocean South Pacific Ocean. Being isolated wave, an experience that will go a very and of little commercial importance, long way towards satiating his desires and still undiscovered of Cook, the in that direction. Like all things else, modern, they are rarely, if ever, visited our sixty hours of misery were finally by the traveller ; even those living in ticked off, and at sunrise of the 24th the colony nearest to them know little we found ourselves under the lee of the more of them than the name, and be- land in the western hemisphere, on a yond that region I believe scarcely one rippleless sea, and beneath the bluest person in a hundred has ever heard of of skies. Ahead lay two low islands, them. The group consists of about a apparently sloping towards each other dozen islets, lying five hundred miles into the passage between which we east of Bank's Peninsula in New Zea- were steaming. As we approached land, the largest no bigger than the Isle nearer, the two islands resolved themof Wight, and the smallest little more selves into the higher northern and than bare, rocky pinnacles rising out of southern westerly extending horns of the sea, whither the wandering alba- Wharekauri (as the natives call the trosses and other ocean birds come largest member of the group), conhome to nest. Ships homeward bound nected by lower lands forming the from antipodean ports, southing to the enclosing bayleted arch and eastern

eastward-moving Trades with boundary of Petre Bay, in which our which to round the Horn, may run anchorage lay. Running east and west close past them without sighting them, along tủe northern horn could be seen for the fogs from the Aptarctic gener- a chain of pyramidal hills, evidently old ally enshroud them from the traveller's volcanic cones, which, though not exview. I fear the ordinary tourist would ceeding seven or eight hundred feet in find nothing of a sensational character height, assumed, on account of the to attract him there. Yet these lone lowness everywhere of the surrounding isles are the fragments of an ancient lands, the aspect of mountains. The vanished land, in whose caves and cliffs southern horn, the highest part of the the delving hand may gather broken island, sloped gradually up towards the records which, pieced together, with soutlı, without presenting any distinctheir disjecta membra gathered out of tive summit. From much I had heard the islands to the south, and the conti- I expected to find the Chatham Islands nents to east and west, tell a story of a wild, bleak, and generally uninviting the southern scas. It tells of geo- speck of land ; instead, I beheld from graphic ups and downs, and the vicissi- the deck as we ran close along the tudes of a fauna and flora not less full southern shores of the bay, broad forest of interest and incident than the tragic patches of that deep dark hue that histories of human inhabitants, of belongs to evergreen trees, broken by which these islands have also been the cultivated fields and wide sheep-pastheatre.

tures, with here and there the characAfter I had waited long for an oppor- teristic wool-shed, marking the settler's tunity of visiting this outlying group, homestead, of which often only a glint the desired occasion at last presenteil could be caught from amid emboweritself in the beginning of 1892, and I ing creepers and scarlet geraniums. embarked at Port Lyttelton on the 21st Bathed as the whole landscape that of January in the Kahu, the small but morning was in the sunshine of one of seaworthy steamer that keeps these the niost perfect of days, it seemed that islanders in touch once in three months 1 to be exiled here out of the “ care and