CORNWALL PARK.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIV, Issue 304, 22 December 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

CORNWALL PARK.

We have received an attractive-look-ing; pamphlet that lias boon prepared in response to a resolution of the Campbell Statue Fund. It is finished in the style for which New Zealand is already the leader in the Southern Hemisphere, and profusely illustrated with excellent photographic reproductions, the likenesses of Sir John Logan Campbell and the Hon. Edwin Mitehelson being especially good.

The work is divided into three parts, which give a picture of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Such dissimilar scenes as the birth of John Logan Campbell, on a cold winter morning in Scotland, and the grim old Maori chief, at this time lord of the One Tree Hill pa, who sat, contemplating the Tamaki Isthmus, on a warm summer evening in New Zealand, lend themselves to the delineation of striking contrasts, of which the author lias taken full advantage. The mother's confidence in her only son's ability to achieve distinction is graphically portrayed in the following passage: "Who, unless he saw with the mother's prejudiced eyes, could have detected the germs of success in this puling infant, or guessed that the weak limbs swathed in flannel and incapable of bearing the owner's weight were destined to tread an unknown land, and that the tiny hand, wandering aimlessly over the mother's breast, would", ill years to come, guide the birth and control the destiny of the. fairest city beneath the Southern Cross?"

Aj*ain, in describing the heritages left by "The Lion of Maungakiekie" and "this son of Scotia." it would be Lard to find a stronger contrast than is summed up in the sentence, "In place of a battle-chipped mere and crumbling fortress, a wide domain, where his people and their unborn descendants may enjoy God's blessings of hill and dale, pure air and lovely scenery, until the end of time."

So alluring a picture is given of life in the twenty-first century, that the reader regrets not having been born a hundred years later: "Travellers speed on noiseless electric cycles and pneu-matic-wheeled motor-cars, by highways so straight and level that the passenger may breakfast in Auckland, lunch in Wellington, and dine in Dtfi*edin."

A tribute is paid to the noble Maori | race in the prediction that the people | will be. benefited by the mingling of J Anglo-Saxon and Maori blood, and that the cominrr New Zealanders will make a name in the world as artists is also pro- j dieted. "A land so lovely as to inspire | {lie savage -Maori with such an cys for : the beautiful as led liim to create t'tie I artistic Tnuapara. or stem-post, for his war canoes, where wonderful design are suggested by the unfolding croak of a tree-fern or the convolutions of the twining mange-mange, could not fail to j have a like effect on the Anglo-Saxon race which succeeded him, and train , the eye from earliest infancy by the contemplation of nature's masterpieces of form, design, and colour." We congratulate the committee on having produced so tasteful a souvenir of Cornwall Park, and expect that many will take the opportunity to send their friends a memento of Sir John Logan Campbell's patriotic gift, which describes in such plowing terms this antipodean land,-"The gem .of the Pacific."