Round the necks of virgins hung,- To the land where spirits rest! The Song of the Spirit, which he composed during the night, over the epistle to Lady Rawdon, is taken up : Thus have I charmed, with visionary lay, Yes! Moore belongs to Canada as well as to Ireland in that special sense which links a poet's name with a locality. Of course, as a poet with a genuine gift of song, he belongs to the world, and will be read and studied when Hazlitt's criticisms are forgotten and those who were befooled by the malicious glitter of epigrammatic trifling have been succeeded by a wiser generation. The spot is pointed out at Kingston where he wrote, "I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled." He stayed a few days at Montreal, where he seems to have been treated with that hospitality and attention he loved. He repaid his hostess with a few verses full of compliments turned with graceful exaggeration, and then left our shores for ever. VETERANS OF THE WAR OF 1812. 191 CHAPTER VI. A FEW sessions ago the Parliament at Ottawa voted a small sum, $50,000 to be distributed among the surviving warriors of 1812, and the two following years. More than half a century had passed since the Treaty of Ghent put a stop to hostilities in which the strong and unrighteous had shown only weakness and won but disgrace, in which the weak, fighting in a righteous cause, engaged in the noblest of all struggles, the struggle for home, for honour, individual and national, had displayed dignity and strength; and as the great, joyous, unselfish hero of antiquity, when ere he attained his eighth month, ignoble but powerful jealousy sent two serpents to destroy him, was in no way terrified but seized the reptiles one in each infant hand and squeezed them to death: so Canada, assailed in the cradle by the two great enemies of national existence, was nothing daunted, but anticipated maturity and crushed what seemed the resistless instruments of easy ruin. More than fifty years had passed since a glow other than that of Indian summer flared along the tranquil bosom of Lake Erie, and Izzard, leaving the fort which sentinelled its waters a smoking ruin, crossed with 8,000 men to American territory. What changes had taken place, what great things had been achieved, what candidates for reward and renown had fought and disappeared, what forces had arisen and dashed themselves against the rocks of doom! There had been a rebellion, great constitutional changes, phantasmagoric invasion, and many who took part in these were as sound asleep as Brock, had passed as completely beyond censure or applause as Fitzgibbon beyond neglect. The intention was to give 66 [Authorities:- Alison's "History of Europe:" Auchinleck's "History of the War of 1812-14 :" David Thompson's "History of the Late War :" Col. Coffin's "Chronicle of the War of 1812 :" "The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, K.B.:" "Historical Sketch of the War of 1812:" by Miss A. M. Machar. A Poetical Account of the Campaigns of 1812 and 1813," by An Acadian. "Life of Colonel Talbot," by Edward Ermatinger. McMullen's "History of Canada." Surviving Veterans of 1812-14 and their friends.] each man a hundred dollars and it might well have been thought that the sum was large enough. But those men of 1812 were a sturdy race and the number of well authenticated surviving warriors was large enough to reduce the share of each to twenty dollars. The old soldiers were, however, well content. They valued the recognition of their services, tardy though that recognition was. It is the privilege of old age to be garrulous, and especially of the old age of soldiers, and we need not be surprised that the faded and wrinkled heroes seized the opportunity to show how fields were won in those days of wilderness, before railways and breechloaders, when nobody dreamed we should send rifle teams to Wimbledon, and the most prophetic soul had no touch of intuition to body forth the railway magnate, either in his tadpole state of bonus-beggar or in the coarse importance of later years of pompous success. On the present the veterans looked with rheumy eyes; the adventures and perils of sixty years ago, with all their incidents, the brightness of the morning of the fight, the bracing keenness of an early frost as they rushed into one of the autumn engagements, the hue of the landscape in which the bloody picture was framed, the light in the glance of the leader giving his last command, all was for them vivid as ever. Over the scenes of those days for them time's curtain could never fall. To talk of that stirring period did the old men good, for this brought with it a breeze of power, a thrill of youth, the rainbow light of hope. Some were bowed under the hand of time. Others were erect and bore their ninety years as if it was a small thing. This one had grown prosperous; to that fortune had been less kind. But prosperous or not they were all glad of public acknowledgment of their services, and it exhilarated the heart of them to greet and grasp the hands of companions in arms of long ago. Samuel Clements, eighty years of age, formerly of Crook's Flank Company, who was present at Queenston Heights, who fought under the solemn stars at Lundy's Lane, would have made a good central figure for a historical picture as he told with uplifted finger how he saw Brock fall. Such a picture well executed might be placed by the side of Miss Thompson's Roll Call. Every winter the society of York Pioneers founded by an Irishman, and presided over by a noble specimen of the United Empire Loyalist, Colonel Denison, celebrates the anniversary of Chrysler's Farm. We live in days when perhaps anniversaries are over-done, when too many seek distinction, not by deeds, but by talking about the deeds of others, when energy is apt to exhaust itself in sparkle and froth. But the deeds of 1812-14 can never pass from men's hearts while Canada is Canada. From whatever point of view we regard the part played by Canada in those years, it is calculated not merely to win sympathy, but to challenge enthusiasm. The struggle was cruelly unequal. All the right and nearly all the valour was with the weaker side. Eight millions were arrayed against two hundred thousand. To-day the United States are only ten times our number. Then they were forty times. Aided by a handful of regular troops, we had to defend a frontier of 1,700 miles, menaced at three critical and vulnerable points. What wonder if there was a momentary sinking of heart? It was but a passing spasm. The people of the Lower Province, the United Empire Loyalists, the sturdy Canadian yeomen, the militia, men of Irish, Scotch, and English blood, all proved themselves worthy of their fathers. Volunteers flocked into the garrison towns. In default of guns and swords, they pressed the peaceful implements of husbandry into the service of war. There is no mood, however solemn, in which we cannot look with complacency on the little bands repulsing a cruel and impolitic invasion. In their hands the sword was something more than an instrument of justice; it was drawn with the choicest blessings of Heaven, and wielded with the force of sacred passions. The defender of his country does not fight for plunder or renown; he is not thinking of stars and crosses; he is no soldier of fortune; no knight errant doing wanton battle in the name of a fantastic honour. He is fighting for home, for the mother who nursed him, for the wife who makes the starlight of his dwelling, for the child who lisps his name, and is impatient at his absence. When the trumpet calls him, these things sweep across his fancy, and he is aware of a sublimed strength, and conscious of an unwonted fire; he feels as the ancients felt in supreme moments of battle, as though the immortals fought beside him, and gave him the victory. And when, with weary hands and heavy eyelids, he sinks into repose, the infinite solace, which belongs to self-sacrifice, is around him, like hovering wings.* The people of Great Britain and Ireland cannot be blamed if the important events which at that time took place on the rivers and lakes of Canada, amid forest shadows and opening margents, received from them but scant attention; a just view has been neither so common nor so emphasized, as is desirable, amongst ourselves. It would be hard to expect men to turn their gaze from Moscow in flames, from Leipsic and the great Napoleon's beaten columns, from the moving spectacle of the Allies entering Paris, and the master of the world a prisoner in a petty island, to Queenston, to Burlington Heights, to the glorious struggle at Chrysler's Farm, to the victorious twenty-fifth of July at Chippawa. Yet though on a smaller scale than those which studded Europe with memories of wasted valour, our fights had a greater influence on the future; they had in them the seeds of things. We have lived to see a revolution in the foreign policy of England, and an Anglo-French alliance with a Napoleon ruling at the Tuileries. But during nigh upon three-quarters of a century, Canada has advanced steadily towards the goal of a national existence. Nor, as we shall see, were our campaigns poor in individual heroism, or wanting in the picturesque. As long as Canada has a history and and a name, so long will the story of Mary Secord walking twenty miles of wilderness, in danger of savage beasts and more savage men, to warn Fitzgibbon of an intended surprise on the Beaver Dam, be told. When in our national gallery of the future, miles of canvas attest the progress of Canadian art, no picture will compel more attention than Brock erect in his canoe leading the way to battle at Detroit, or the same gallant captain, shouting while the fatal lead whizzes to his heart: "Push on the brave York Volunteers." The tenacity of the two privates of the Forty-first who kept the bridge in the western marshes, though these swell the mass of undistinguished valour, stirs the heart as surely as the heroism of men more fortunate in renown. Centuries hence men will turn with admiration to Tecumseh, shaming by his determination the timid Proctor, or later, telling * In the above and the following paragraph, there are a few sentences which have already appeared in a periodical. |