Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 408, January 1849

Various

Various

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 408, January 1849

THE CAXTONS. – PART THE LAST

CHAPTER CI

Adieu, thou beautiful land! Canaan of the exiles, and Ararat to many a shattered ark! Fair cradle of a race for whom the unbounded heritage of a future, that no sage can conjecture, no prophet divine, lies afar in the golden promise-light of Time! – destined, perchance, from the sins and sorrows of a civilisation struggling with its own elements of decay, to renew the youth of the world, and transmit the great soul of England through the cycles of Infinite Change. All climates that can best ripen the products of earth, or form into various character and temper the different families of man, "rain influences" from the heaven, that smiles so benignly on those who had once shrunk, ragged, from the wind, or scowled on the thankless sun. Here, the hardy air of the chill Mother Isle, there the mild warmth of Italian autumns, or the breathless glow of the tropics. And with the beams of every climate, glides subtle Hope. Of her there, it may be said as of Light itself, in those exquisite lines of a neglected poet —

"Through the soft ways of heaven, and air, and sea,

Which open all their pores to thee

Like a clear river thou dost glide —

All the world's bravery, that delights our eyes,

Is but thy several liveries;

Thou the rich dye on them bestowest;

Thy nimble pencil paints the landscape as thou goest."[1 - Cowley's Ode to Light.]

Adieu, my kind nurse and sweet foster-mother! – a long and a last adieu! Never had I left thee but for that louder voice of Nature which calls the child to the parent, and woos us from the labours we love the best by the chime in the Sabbath-bells of Home.

No one can tell how dear the memory of that wild Bush-life becomes to him who has tried it with a fitting spirit. How often it haunts him in the commonplace of more civilised scenes! Its dangers, its risks, its sense of animal health, its bursts of adventure, its intervals of careless repose – the fierce gallop through a very sea of wide rolling plains – the still saunter, at night, through woods never changing their leaves – with the moon, clear as sunshine, stealing slant through their clusters of flowers. With what an effort we reconcile ourselves to the trite cares and vexed pleasures, "the quotidian ague of frigid impertinences," to which we return! How strong and black stands my pencil-mark in this passage of the poet from which I have just quoted before! —

"We are here among the vast and noble scenes of Nature – we are there among the pitiful shifts of policy; we walk here, in the light and open ways of the Divine Bounty – we grope there, in the dark and confused labyrinth of human malice."[2 - Cowley on Town and Country. (Discourse on Agriculture.)]

But I weary you, reader. The New World vanishes – now a line – now a speck: let us turn away, with the face to the Old.

Among my fellow-passengers, how many there are returning home disgusted, disappointed, impoverished, ruined, throwing themselves again on those unsuspecting poor friends, who thought they had done with the luckless good-for-naughts for ever. For don't let me deceive thee, reader, into supposing that every adventurer to Australia has the luck of Pisistratus. Indeed, though the poor labourer, and especially the poor operative from London and the great trading towns, (who has generally more of the quick knack of learning – the adaptable faculty– required in a new colony, than the simple agricultural labourer,) are pretty sure to succeed, the class to which I belong is one in which failures are numerous, and success the exception – I mean young men with scholastic education and the habits of gentlemen – with small capitals and sanguine hopes. But this, in ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is not the fault of the colony, but of the emigrants. It requires, not so much intellect as a peculiar turn of intellect, and a fortunate combinatio