ENGLAND AND AUSTRALIA.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.1 Silo—Among the good things that this present giant war of hate and horror has brought forth'is the opportunity it eras given us Australians to show our deep love for England, or, as we always called it, -Home. I think the English have not known how this feeling lived in our hearts. It has grown up with us, made part of us, only to .die when we die. Our parents from Scotch moors, from English -meadows, have told ns of the Motherland, with that love which is as much the love of one's own childhood and youth as of the land _where one was horn-and :bred. Our books have been of hers and we could tell you about-each English month with its birds and flowers or winter sleep with more certainty than we could of our own. We were doubly fortunate, -for we hadesue own beautiful country, which we loved perhaps better than -we knew,
and also our dreamland, our :deal, our England. We knew that our ancestors had lived in, and been moulded by, her for almost untold hundreds of years; we, too, were of her, though transplanted to another land. Like children—which we all are up to the day of our death— we endowed her with all the virtues of our own country as well as her own ; till the light that never was on land or sea shone on her. When we read English poetry it was all the more wonderful because we had not seen the things the pages told us of, for imagination has always more marvel in it than reality. To know that a thing is like what one has seen is comparatively commonplace ; but to know it true from hints, suggestions, pictures, intuition, has something strangely enthralling about it. Then it may have been partly the difference that made us enjoy, for instance, the descriptions of snow and icy cold, as a man enjoys the storm without from his own fireside. To read a poem of Burns, as I did when a little child, one beginning thus alluringly- " The wintry west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blew, Or the stormy north sends driving forth The blinding sleet and snaw "- with a picture of sheep sheltering in the fold, with snow lying thick about, and another of the burn " tumbling brown " and roaring " free bank to brae " ; and to be within sight of deepest blue sea, warm cunshino and flowers, and a radiant life informing and covering all, was, I know now, to enjoy a very piquant contrast. We see England through art, and art shows us the ideal, either smoothing out roughneases or making them a source of delight. So we live in Australia, enviable people, owners of a real and a dream world. Stand ng afar off from England, it may be we can see the soul of her ; and souls are perfect though bodies are imperfect. We feel that a world without England in it would be a worthless world to us ; and this war is a holy war, in which we go as on a crusade, looking to England as our Jerusalem.—
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