And the brown frolic face of The girl has grown white, And she sobs with the strained throbbing dumbness of fright. With his blue eyes agleam, and His wild russet hair Streaming back, the man travails, And where that warm primeval ocean rolled A second forest buds, blooms broad, grows old; And a new race of prehistoric men Springs from the mystic soil, and once again Fades like a wood-mist thro' the woodlands hoar. For lo! the great dim centuries once more With wind and fire, with rain and snow sweep by; And where the forest stood, an empty sky The ages speed! And now the skin canoe The brazen horns ring out; a thund'rous throng The dim time lapses till that vesper hour Broods o'er the summer lake with peaceful power, Of the lithe shape that crouches, the green When the carved galley thro' the sunset floats, eyes that glare. And now, hark! as he drives with A last mighty swing The stone blade of the axe through From the blanched lips what screams of wild agony spring! There's a rush thro' the fern fronds, And the savage and sabre-tooth Close in fierce fight; The rowers, with chains of gold about their throats, "Row, knights, a little nearer to the land And let us hear these monks of Ely sing;" Says KNUT, the king. In the dim years what fateful hour arrives, And the red sunset smoulders and blackens to And who is this rides fenward from St. Ives? The great dim centuries of long ago A man of massive presence, - bluff and stern. At Ely there in these idyllic days Sweep past with rain and fire, with wind and Is but to please his children and his wife, snow, And where the savage swung his axe of stone The blue clay,silts on Titan trunks o'erthrown, O'er mammoth's tusks, in river-horse's lair; And, armed with deer horn, clad in girdled hair, A later savage in his hollow tree Hunts the strange broods of a primeval sea. And yet the great dim centuries again To drain the fens-and magnify the Lord. So in his plain cloth suit, with close-tucked sword, OLIVER CROMWELL, fated but unknown, Rides where the savage swung his axe of stone. In the class-room blue-eyed Phemie Sits, half listening, hushed and dreamy, Sweep past with snow and fire, with wind and To the gray-haired pinched professor droning rain, to his class of girls. Eyes of every shade of splendor, Brown and bashful, blue and tender, And one pretty plague has during All the class been caricaturing Her short-sighted, good old master with a world of wicked zest ; And the madcaps blush and titter, As they see the unconscious sitter Grey and giddy, black and throbbing with a Sketched as Allophylian savage-spectacled deep impassioned light: Golden ringlets, raven clusters, Falling on white necks, plump shoulders clothed in green and blue and white. but much undressed. But the old man turns the pages Tracing from earth's mystic missal the an- Not six thousand years — but eras, Ages, eons disappear as Groping back we touch the system where the human first began. Centuries, as we retrogress, are Dwarfed to days, says the professor, And our lineage was hoary ere Eve's apple-tree grew green; Old, he says, art thou, strange stone! Nor When the fens were drained this axe was found below two forests sunk. Underneath a bed of sea clay And two forests this relique lay Where some Allophylian savage left it in a halfhewn trunk! Does the old professor notice Large eyes, blue as myosotis, Raised to him in startled wonder as those fateful words are said? But for Phemie, thro' the trees in By the swamp in the forest As his flint-headed hatchet But the hatchet cleaves fast in the trunk he has riven Buzz of smothered frolic rises underneath his The man meagre nose. stands unarmed as the sabre-tooth springs ! PATER VESTER PASCIT ILLA. OUR bark is on the waters! wide around Shrieks to the levelled weapon's answering sound: Grasp its lank wing, and on, with reckless bound! Yet, creature of the surf, a sheltering breast To-night shall haunt in vain thy far-off nest, A call unanswered search the rocky ground. Lord of leviathan! when Ocean heard Thy gathering voice, and sought his native breeze, When whales first plunged with life, and the proud deep Felt unborn tempests heave in troubled sleep, Thou didst provide, e'en for this nameless bird Home and a natural love amid the surging From The Edinburgh Review. present time would be an anachronism. We are invited, and indeed compelled, to turn our attention to a subject even more directly affecting our imperial interests and our military resources; for it is obvious that the outbreak of war in South Africa tends to weaken the influence of England in other parts of the globe, and is a practical diversion in favor of our rivals or antagonists elsewhere. Turks or Bashi-Bazouks. The scene was not a foreign country, but a part of the Two years ago, in January, 1877, the queen's dominions. The victims might be Quarterly Review published a remarkable our fellow-subjects or our own troops; article on the affairs of South Africa, and the cost of the sixth Kaffir war, and which obviously expressed the opinions of of the Zulu war which follows it, was pretty the eminent historian who had recently sure to fall in the end on the British taxvisited that country in a semi-official ca- | payer. To prolong the discussion of the pacity. We differed from many things Eastern question or the Afghan war at the which were advanced in that article. We could not accept the charges freely made against the past policy of the British government, or the genial admiration of the writer for the patriarchal virtues of the Dutch Boers, or the confident hope that the arrival of Sir Bartle Frere in South Africa would raise order out of chaos, or peace and prosperity out of misgovernment and confusion. A reply was therefore published by this journal in the month of April, 1877, and we may venture to say that it was written by no unworthy hand. The controversy was, in fact, maintained with signal ability on both sides, and if it failed to attract in any great measure the attention of the public, this must be attributed to the absorbing interest of the Eastern question, and to the fact that the discussion was chiefly of a retrospective characThe people of England, ever intent on one thing at a time, failed to perceive the very serious questions which were already in full agitation in the British South African possessions. Atrocities, far more dreadful than those of Bulgaria, were being committed by savages on our own frontier. Christian civilization was threatened by hordes far more barbarous than ter. In February, 1878 the state of affairs in South Africa was thus briefly summarized by Sir Arthur Cunynghame : Affairs within the colony were now in considerable confusion. The Fingoes, our allies, were guilty of great outrages upon the unfortunate Gaikas. They went about in bands, intercepting the women and plundering them, and if they found a man in a woman's dress, they made very short work of him with assegais. On all sides difficulties seemed to be on the increase. A war unfinished on the Kei, a rebellion in the colony, of which the proportions could not be ascertained, but reaching to our doors, a rising in Pondoland, and insults heaped upon the government by the paramount chief Umgaikela. An outbreak in the East Griqualand location at Kokstadt; the Transvaal continually threatened by Secocoeni; and Cetewayo, king of the Zulus, actually in arms on the border of Natal, driving away the settlers, and erecting his forts upon the Boer locations. Alarming letters were received by the lieutenant-governor of the Transvaal from the extreme eastern frontier by every post, and a force was then at Utrecht protecting our borders, while the small number of imperial troops at Pretoria were detaching men to Middleburg, and the Boers were holding seditious I meetings even in the capital. There were risings on the borders of Griqualand West, the Baralongs and the Batlapins taking the field (p. 369). In justice to Sir Bartle Frere, it must be said that the difficulties he had to encoun |