trywoman, Lady Charlotte Rawdon, and dated "from the banks of the St. Lawrence," he gives his impression of Niagara, the St. Lawrence, and Toronto.

I dreamt not then that, ere the rolling year
Had filled its circle, I should wander here
In musing awe; should tread this wondrous world,
See all its store of inland waters hurl'd
In one vast volume down Niagara's steep;
Or calm behold them, in transparent sleep,
Where the blue hills of old Toronto shed
Their evening shadows o'er Ontario's bed;
Should trace the grand Cataraqui, and glide
Down the white rapids of his lordly tide,

liged to row all the way. The journey took five days. During the day the sun was intense. At night they were forced to take shelter on the banks in any hut whose owners would receive them. "But," cries the poet, "the magnificent scenery of the St. Lawrence repays all these difficulties." He added that there was not a note of the air which did not recall to his memory "the dip of our oars in the St. Lawrence, the flight of our boat down the rapids, and all those new and fanciful impressions to which my heart was alive during the whole of this very interesting voyage." I hope this book of mine will fall into a great variety of hands, and as some of my poorer countrymen too often content themselves with an edition of the Melodies only, at the risk of being accused of bringing coal to Newcastle, I reproduce the stanzas :—

A CANADIAN BOAT-SONG.

WRITTEN ON THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE.

Et remigem cantus hortatur.--Quintilian.

Faintly as tolls the evening chime,

Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time.
Soon as the woods on shore look dim,
We'll sing at St. Ann's our parting hymn.
Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near, and the daylight's past!

Why should we yet our sail unfurl?

There is not a breath the blue wave to curl!

But when the wind blows off the shore,

Oh! sweetly we'll rest our weary oar.

Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near, and the daylight's past!

Utawas' tide! this trembling moon
Shall see us float over thy surges soon.
Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers,
Oh! grant us cool heavens and favouring airs.
Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near, and the daylight's past!

A SUBLIME THRONE.

Through massy woods, 'mid islets flowering fair,
And blooming glades, where the first sinful pair
For consolation might have weeping trod,

When banished from the garden of their God."

Here is a fine night picture on the St. Lawrence :
Among the reeds, in which our idle boat

Is rock'd to rest, the wind's complaining note
Dies, like a half-breathed whispering of flutes;
Along the wave the gleaming porpoise shoots,
And I can trace him, like a watery star,
Down the steep current, till he fades afar
Amid the foaming breakers silvery light,

Where yon rough Rapids sparkle through the night!
Here, as along this shadowy bank I stray,

And the smooth glass-snake, gliding o'er my way,
Shows the dim moonlight through his scaly form,
Fancy, with all the scene's enchantment warm,
Hears in the murmur of the nightly breeze,

Some Indian Spirit warble words like these.

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Then follows the Song of the Spirit, very fanciful and beautiful, in which many a Canadian picture is woven with Indian legends. The description the Spirit gives of himself, sitting on the edge of Niagara in winter time, is magnificent :

Oft when hoar and silvery flakes
Melt along the ruffled lakes;

When the grey moose sheds his horns,
When the track at evening warns

Weary hunters of the way
To the wigwam's cheering ray,
Then, aloft through freezing air,
With the snow-bird soft and fair
As the fleece that heaven flings
O'er his little pearly wings,
Light above the rocks I play,
Where Niagara's starry spray,
Frozen on the cliff, appears,
Like a giant's starting tears!
There, amid the island sedge,
Just upon the cataract's edge,
Where the foot of living man
Never trod since time began,
Lone I sit, at close of day,

While, beneath the golden ray,

Icy columns gleam below,

Feathered round with falling snow,

And an arch of glory springs,

Brilliant as the chain of rings

Round the necks of virgins hung,-
Virgins who have wandered young
O'er the waters of the west,

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,
The lonely moments of the night away;
And now, fresh daylight o'er the water beams!
Once more embarked upon the glittering streams,
Our boat flies light along the leafy shore,
Shooting the falls, without a dip of oar
Or breath of zephyr, like the mystic bark
The poet saw, in dreams divinely dark,
Borne, without sails, along the dusky flood,
While on its deck a pilot angel stood,
And, with his wings of living light unfurled,
Coasted the dim shores of another world!

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.

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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

[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.]

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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 Irish

and presided over by a noble specimen of the United Empire