A STRANGE SOUND.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8191, 5 August 1912, Page 4

A STRANGE SOUND.

There’s a strange sound in the air. All day long it is there, and all night, too. It never ceases.

Yet there is no monotony in it. It is one sound, but in it tho sensitive car can detect innumerable significances. It is the sound of "unrest." This is an age of "unrest." Unrest in industry, unrest in religion, unrest in morals, unrest in science, art, literature, philosophy/ politics —unrest in all the spheres of human activity. Tho sound of it surrounds ifs.

No matter how quiet the time and place; though it may bo that mystic moment in mountain solitudes when nature no longer seems to breathe, but lies in a trance beneath the magic of the moon; even then, if you listen intently, you will hear that strange sound. It is not a musical sound, for there is something of discord in it. It is not a discordant sound, for there is something o? music in it.

It is a sound that thrills you through and through with a mysterious suggestiveness of you know not what. There have been ages of "unrest” before.

Every two or three centuries men become dissatisfied with old conventions and out-worn forms of thought, and feel the social fabric too narrow to contain a new-born energy that throbs in their veins, and fires their minds with a wondrous lust for Hotter Things. _ We have reached such a period in this our day. New movements of every kind are sweeping away Tradition, are impeaching Authority, are vanquishing established lies, and extending the sovereignty of Truth beyond horizons only glimpsed in the past by lonely climbers to the peaks. The air is filled with tho sound of "unrest." " . A strange sound, with a note alarming in it, and a note alluring too. A sound the like of which one never hears in field or forest, nor amidst tho multitudinous sounds of city labyrinths. It is inspiring, it is terrifying, it plunges us into moods of despair, it uplifts us to transports of hope. Uncanny is the sound of "unrest"— uncanny with haunting hints of death, yet pulsing also with the promise of a new life. A strange eoTind truly—the sound of dead men rising from their graves, and casting off their winding sheets.