CHANGE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2287, 30 December 1897, Page 43

CHANGE.

Change ! What a chameleon-like word ifc is 1 with as many different aspects as there are moods of mind and environments of life. • Now it embodies all we most desire and pray for — and again with that one word we ring the deathknell to love, and set the seal upon the grave of Hope. Change is essentially the modern patent medicine — mentally, morally, and physically. We must all " have a change " ; not only the workers, the busy fathers and mothers for whom " rest " would spell " change " — but the butterflies, the daughters who work so hard at amusing themselves and securing their social popularity, the sons whose university studies for six months oat of the twelve leave them "quite run down,"

the children who" cram ali the 'ologies and spend their spare time in rehearsing for the "closing- ceremonies" of the school year — change is the one and only panacea for all of us. It was my pleasure to recently meet some very interesting tourists, both English and American, and their impressions of colonial life were naturally both vivid and amusing. Strangers see us in a light which is impossible to ourselves, no matter how seriously we take ourselves. These strangers were much struck by our migratory habits. " You people seem to spend your time in travelling from one island to the other. What a coastal service you support. It is marvellous. All along the coast we found the steamers crowded, and the|officers assured us that this is by no means specially busy time of tho year."

"But, surely, with your facilities for travel, cheap rates, and comfortable arrangements, there must be much mora travelling at Home?" I objected.

Not at all, i assure you. Compare your scanty population with ours. Why the average English or Scotch provincial never dreams of wandering about in the delightfully fiippanc manner which seems natural to •you colonials. What do you go to see ?. What do you go to learn ? "

This is how our restless demand for change struck outsiders. Yet it is useless to deny that change, as couveyed by means of travel, is a welcome excitement to most people. The very thought is stimulating to the imagination. The exchange of well-worn actualities for nebulous possibilities is like a tonic. Such change is the " open sesame " in the doctor's box of conjuring tricks when his little-great powers confess themselves at a loss. When he sees the shadow of Death, relentless, inexorable, waiting in the gloom of the archway, he consults with his brother

physicians, and thoy r<commend "a complete change." ,The worn-out body may succumb, the wearied braia sink into apathy or confusion, but the evil hour may be postponed for a season by the^novelty and excitement of "a change."

This is a common aspect of change — common because personal ; but there 3s another sense, that of Nature's changes, in which we rarely consider the word. The ' changes of the seasons — what an immense amount of small talk they supply us with I— and the various startling manifestations of Nature's more violent moods, such as earthquakes, cyclones, tidal waves, &0., makeup the limit of our speculations as to Nature's changes. Most people regard the work of creation as a matter of the remotest past ; very few look beyond that aspect of finality and realise that creation in the form of continual universal change is being carried on every moment. How jauntily we chatter away our lifctle stock phrases. "The world is very small a"fter all " — the world of men, women, and places with which we are familiar we mean. We read of the wan, spectral moon moving through space with burnt-out vitality, quenched firee, cold and death-like. The mighty sun himself ie cooling — bis fierce splendour past. Nor is there a cloudless summer evening or froßty winter's night in which you shall nob see some brilliant beautiful star real o£E into space. What is all this but change ? -

" The mills of the gods grind slowly "—so do the mills of. Nature. So slowly that in our harried litle life we have no time to notice, scarcely even could appreciate if we did notice, the changes. Moreover, we are so occupied with our own concerns : we tremble with dread of onr own inventions. ■ KJingß pray for peace and provide for war. Oar own little puppet Bhow is all in all to us. Only sometimes when we are reading, sometimes when we have leisure to converse— which is seldom — we realise how quick are the changes which Nature may effect under favourable conditions. Then for a few moments it may be we realise that the mighty work of creation as carried out in change and development is always going on

—now, in oar own live*, as in Nature's eternal calendar.

In reading " The Cruise of the Alerte," by Knight, the extraordinary changes which have taken place in the Island of Trinadad within quite recent times afford a mosft interesting example of Nature's constant, ceaseless work. "The i»let has been so shaken to its foundation by earthquake shock and volcanic action that it is brittle from tho mountain tops to the beach, and is in a state of perpetual change." Change, indeed I for " thousands and thousands of trees covered the valley, each of them about 30ft high ; but every tree was dead and extended its leafless boughs to another— a forest of desolation, as if Nature had at some particular moment ceased to vegetate " ; so wrote Captain Marryat in 1829. And again in reading a recent account of the Kiondyke goldfield one specially realised how busily away in the world's solitudes the work of election still goes on — working here with heat, as in the unutterably lonely sea-girt solitudes of Trinidad, and there with cold, as in the inexorable, pitiless region of the far north, where through all the years " the glaciers, with a weight of millions upon millions of viscous ice, grind the rocks to powder as they move slowly down the valleys; and, not ooatent with' doing 'so, carry the remains oE their milling down to the foot of the Hills,"

Eternal ohange in all things — then how can we escape its alchemy? Yet we alternately pray for it and strive to ensure it with all our petty strength ; or fight against it and cry to heaven to' shield us from its cruel breath.

Our consistency *s mortals lies .in our inconsistency 1 Sometimes we allow ourselves to credit such limitless possibilities to "change" that it growß to be a kind of fetish, which we invoke with- prayers and incantationß as though the normal state of everything about us in Nature, human nature, physical welfare, and moral being was rest — stagnation. "Anything for ft change," says the bored society girl. " I am dead sick of all this little round; I want to see something and somebody new — I want a change 1 " Why, so you do, poor girl 1 but not th« kind you mean. The change you want is in yourself. You Want to fill your objectless hours with work for others, sharpen your dull brain with intelligent reading. Kill your empty self-oomplacency by getting a glimpse of your real ignorance ; warm ,'your selfish egotism by active endeavour for those whose lot is really hard and wretched. This is tho change you need— within, not without.

In sharp contrast to the change we sigh for and set up as our open sesame to health or happiness are the changes we dread and right against, with all our rebellious natures up in arms. Such changes are, we knowin our sad hearts, ifievitable,.y«t wo confess ourselves powerless, to arm against their wounding, incapable, of providing, against their famine. Day by day deeper into, our experience feats the truth that " > ■ • ! We change as all things change here— NothiDg in this world can last. When one we love has changed, even though we ruffle it bravely, sing the same songs, laugh at the same stale joke?, tread with never-fi«gging feet the path of busy idleness or inexorable. toil, yet the iron has entered nto our soul 3, and we say as we turn, our faces to the wall— ' . In the daad unhappy night, and when the r&in is on the roof— " Death had been more merciful I "

The lover we loved, the friend we trusted in — present yet changed— becomes a grief and an insult, and wounds us afresh in all that ho does or leaves undone. But she whom we loved and is dead disd loving us ; the frsars we weep for her are blessed, the lonoly longing for her hand and voice is sacred ; pure sorrow without one touch of shame has no bitterness. We may not grieve too mvicb, for she is but waiting, for us ; we may not doubt or be impatient, for— hark I is it not possible that so we may grieve her 1 Who is there among us that will not confess that death indeed is merciful in OQ2> parison with change 1