Love's own heart, a living Spring of strong thanksgiving, Can bid no strength of welling song find way One word for joy to speak, And even its strength makes weak The too strong yearning of the soul to say While darkness makes division of the quick and dead. Haply, where the sun Wanes, and death is none, The word known here of silence only, held May leap in living song Forth, and the speech be strong As here the silence whence it yearned and welled From hearts whose utterance love sealed fast Till death perchance might give it grace to live at last. Here we have our earth Yet, with all the mirth Of all the summers since the world began, All strengths of rest and strife And love-lit love of life Where death has birth to wife, And where the sun speaks, and is heard of man : And like the sea the soul of man gives back his word. Earth's enkindled heart Bears benignant part In the ardent heaven's auroral pride of prime: If ever home on earth Were found of heaven's grace worth As here makes bright the fostering face of time, Here, heaven bears witness, might such grace Fall fragrant as the dewfall on that brightening face. Here, for mine and me, All that eyes may see Hath more than all the wide world else of good, All nature else of fair: Here as none otherwhere Heaven is the circling air, Heaven is the homestead, heaven the wold, the wood: From broadening wings of cedars breathes of dawn's bright bed. Once a dawn rose here More divine and dear, Rose on a birth-bed brighter far than dawn's, Whence all the summer grew Sweet as when earth was new And pure as Eden's dew: And yet its light lives on these lustrous lawns, Clings round these wildwood ways, and cleaves To the aisles of shadow and sun that wind unweaves and weaves. Thoughts that smile and weep, Dreams that hallow sleep, Brood in the branching shadows of the trees, Tall trees at agelong rest Wherein the centuries nest, Whence, blest as these are blest, We part, and part not from delight in these ; Whose comfort, sleeping as awake, We bear about within us as when first it spake. Comfort as of song Grown with time more strong, Made perfect and prophetic as the sea, Far off our hungering eyes, Of life not ours, yet ours as theirs may be Whose souls far off us shine and sing As ere they sprang back sunward, swift as fire might spring. All this oldworld pleasance Hails a hallowing presence, And thrills with sense of more than summer near, The song-surpassing cry Of rapture that July Lives, for her love who makes it loveliest here; The breath of life she gave me breathes it here anew. Never birthday born Highest in height of morn Whereout the star looks forth that leads the sun Shone higher in love's account, Still seeing the mid noon mount From the eager dayspring's fount Each year more lustrous, each like all in one; We could not see so lovely save by grace of love. ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. SISYPHUS IN IRELAND 25 LAND ACTS IN 26 YEARS ON the 15th of February, 1870, Mr. Gladstone, then Prime Minister, favoured the House of Commons with one of the many perorations in which he has guaranteed the finality of each of his successive legislative efforts with respect to Ireland. He spoke of the Land Bill which he was introducing, and he said : What we desire is that the work of this Bill should be like the work of Nature herself, when on the face of a desolated land she restores what has been laid waste by the wild and savage hand of man. Its operations, we believe, will be quiet and gradual. We wish to alarm none; we wish to injure no one. What we wish is that where there has been despondency there shall be hope; where there has been mistrust there shall be confidence; where there has been alienation and hate there shall, however gradually, be woven the ties of a strong attachment between man and man. In order that there may be a hope of its entire success it must be passed, not as a triumph of party over party, or class over class; not as the lifting up of an ensign to record the downfall of that which has once been great and powerful, but as a common work of common love and goodwill to the common good of our common country. It is interesting, in view of these magnificent aspirations, to test their value by the criterion of facts. Let us see what are the benefits which this saving measure has really produced. Since 1870 no fewer than twenty-four Acts dealing with Irish land have been passed by the Imperial Parliament, and the present year has produced a twentyfifth. In 1881 came the second great Land Act, by which the confusion created by the Act of 1870 was enormously increased. The introduction of that Act was of course accompanied by the usual peroration. Justice, sir, is to be our guide; we proceed upon a reckoning which cannot fail. It has been said that love is stronger than death; even so justice is stronger than popular excitement-stronger than the passions of the moment, stronger even than the grudges, the resentments, the sad traditions of the past. Walking in that path we cannot err. Guided by that light-that divine light-we are safe. Every step that we take upon our road is a step that brings us nearer to the goal. And so on, and so on, in the usual common form. Now let us see how much nearer the goal we have really got, whither the path in which we cannot err' is leading us, and what is the spectacle which the 'divine light,' as manipulated by Mr. Gladstone's magic lantern, has revealed to us. It is perhaps scarcely yet realised by the public generally that in the present year of grace we have come back to precisely the point from which we started in 1881, and that the term of fifteen years, described as the 'judicial term' in that Act, having expired, we are now deliberately starting once more upon the same vicious round, and commencing once more the same impossible task which we first set ourselves to perform fifteen years ago. But it must not be supposed for a moment that the mere fact of our having returned to our former starting point after fifteen years' progress down the road in which we can never err' is the sole or the principal mischief which has been inflicted upon the nation by the reckless legislation of 1881. 6 'AS IN 1881, BUT WORSE Attempts have been made from time to time to encourage the belief that each successive Act brings us nearer to a conclusion; that what one measure leaves undone, the next in part at any rate accomplishes. There could not be a greater delusion. Sisyphus was a practical business man, the Danaides were wise virgins improving the hours and engaged in a hopeful and useful occupation, in comparison with the perpetrators of a modern Irish Land Act. Not only is the goal never approached, but at every succeeding step we see it recede further and further into the distance. Not only do the original difficulties remain practically untouched, but each addition to the Statute-book produces new difficulties from which we have hitherto been free. Like some of the lowest forms of the animal kingdom, the creature which has been let loose in Ireland breeds and spreads from every knot and joint of its shapeless form, till it threatens to fill the land. Twenty-five statutes, 261 pages of laws, judges and commissioners by the score, lawyers like locusts, and what is the result? In 1896 we are precisely at the point which we left in 1881. All over Ireland applications for fair rents are once more raining in; once more we are told the courts are to be choked with suitors, the old judicial terms are coming to an end, and the new ones are to begin. That the Irish Land Acts should have failed is not a matter of surprise; the amazing thing is that any one in the world could ever have expected them to succeed. To carry out an elaborate mathematical calculation under the impression that two and two make five, and that the less contains the greater, would lead to remarkable results. But the authors of the successive Land Acts have been far more ingenious in their methods of ensuring triumphant error tham our hypothetical mathematician. Knowing well what was the result at which they aimed, they have shown a perfectly amazing skill in |
