THE NEW YEAR.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 5475, 2 January 1905, Page 5

THE NEW YEAR.

THE PIONEERS. SOME STRAY REFLECTIONS. New Year, bo good to England. Bid her name Shine Euuliko ns of old- on all the seas. —Swinburne. ‘■'Of all sound of all bells—(bells, the music highest bordering upon heaven) — .meat solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year,” wrote Charles Lamb the Delightful. As the bells of Wellington rang out the old year on Saturday night—tho Inst night of 11XH-—-there must have been many a thought of those, at Home—-tho Home that tbo pioneer stock knows and the Homo that the colonial sous for the most part know of only in imagination. “New Year, ho good to England,” we may well say with tho poet, as tho vision momentarily takes us far out across tho seas, picturing scenes in th© Old Land, with the hope that the New Year will dispel tho distress and fogs and other disagreeable things that must have made the heart of many ail Englishman sore on New Year’s Eve. Our stock is tho English stock; our sympathies are the same; \ve feel as they at Homo feci, and so, with the dawn of IMS we wish them well. There com© across tho ocean tho words of the interpreter of the Imperial sentiment to remind us of our duty: The Law that yo make shall be law and

1 do not press my will. Because ye are Sons of The Blood and call

mo Mother still. Now must ye speak Ip your kinsmen and they must speak to you, After the use of the English, in straighthung words and few. A * » <e

And what have the Sous of the Blood accomplished iu New Zealand?- Viewing tho position on the eve of the New Year, there is every reason for the old stock planted here and its descendants to feel proud of the development brought about in such a short period. It seems but the other day that the pioneer settlers went to rest at nights with rifle under pillow ; now there is the busy hum of industry everywhere; thriving bush settlements and prosperous, cities. The monuments overlooking Wanganui river, and near snowy- Egmont, and under the sunny skies of Hawke’s Bay—aye, and away further north in Auckland—bear silent testimony to the sacrifice made in the cause of colonisation. “Military settlers” some of them were called; great work they did, and we in our time are not unmindful of the burden borne in this colony by those who have goiio before. Alfred Domett’s, lines, written with experience of the work dono by the military settlers, .and inscribed on thq tablet showing the last resting place in Napier cemetery of Captain St, George, who fell while storming a pair at Rato Aire, indicate with pathos the poet’s feelings:

Go to. tfiy grave, yd noon from labour cease. Rest on thy sheaves, thy harvest work is done. Come from tho heart of bottle, and in

peace,, Soldier, go, home, with thee the fight is won.

Yes, the fight, has been won, and today there looms out of th© firmament pf colonisation the brightest, star in the British colonial diadem, Whq plapetl it there? The early settlers, and sol-diers—-men of the Sf, George gtamp-r----who paved the way for those who

Follow after—follow after—for the harvest is sown. By the banes areut the ways-de ye shall come to your 0.wn.1 * ♦ *. ». ■ •

Tho work of the pioneers is seen more particularly as one' travels into, tho heart of this island and sees tho, trapsfpj’matioj; that has taken place.. It only- scetns the other day that William C’olcnso, who saw this, country- as ft, was i« the dawn of its development ’ as a, British polony, traversed op foot, th.-e whole of the Welling-, top away across the Tararuas, and Bnahines, There wore then few white men. IJe lived to witness a remark-. Ohio, .change, Civilisation has transformed the virgin bosh into, happy homesteads;, where once, tribal conflicts were rampant the industrious. settler now flourishes. Through tho roadless tracks and dense forests of former times tho. railway n« speeds its course. Coleus®, who, had dipped deep into, the volume of Mature and had plucked secrets from her bosom which tli® future inhahitarfts of this country- will vain® far above the passing profit of the hour, away hack in 1.547 inarched across the “saored sands” pear Bnapehu, iii search of some, little known Maoris isolated on fhe upper banks, of the flangitikei river, near the western flank of the, lluahinc range. On the, eve of this New Year morn it is interoatiug to recall, what the old pioneer fylf as Ire viewed the prospect that • lay before him- This “sandy desert,” a most despjate apd weird-look-ing spot, he described as a fit place for Macbeth's, witches., or Faustus’s. Bracken scene-. “About it, too, the, old Maoris have many peculiar stories and superstitious, fears, some of which I have no doubt are' agglutinated around a nucleus of reality. Here and there burnt logs lay scattered and embedded in the volcanic sand, as if where a fiery eruption from the neighbouring volcano had issued forth in times long past upon the then living forest,”

J4sten -to the. pioneer's, story of a night spent on tho mountains, amid falling (-.non- and sleet—“ Often enough did these highly-smtifble words of my favourite old poet, Qssiftn, cross, my is night; Xam alone, forlorn op the hill of storms. The wind is heard op the mountains; the torrent pours down the rocks, Xt> luit repefyes me from the rain; forlorn on the hiU of winds,’ The natives insisted, gays the old philosopher, that the sounds they heard between the fitful tarings of the blast among the trees were net merely those of the trees creaking, and of the denizens of the forest-—parrots, owls, and wood-beds —but of the justly irate “patqpaiarehe” (wood-nymphs or fairies), or of the ghosts of the deadjust, indeed, as Ossian has it, and Schilier laments in “W

Alas! the old faided existences are no moret The fascinated race has emigrated.

Ctn this, the dawn of the New Tear, then, kindly thoughts go out- to t-he pipneers. They haye done their work faithfully and well, and we who -’follow after’’ treasure their efforts in deep remembranoß. Many of them are gone; eyen now some -tire going, From the West comes fittingly the vision of the pOet '.rr^

I hear the tread of the pioneer Pf nations yet to be. The first levy wash ef human ware Where Boon shall roll a sea.