STARTLING PREDICTIONS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1178, 15 May 1884, Page 3

STARTLING PREDICTIONS.

A writer in a Home paper gives the following from the pen of one of the most accomplished novelists of the daj 7 , who, ‘ with a passionate love of beauty and an unequalled power of wordpainting,' puts it into the mouth of a Norse poet and preacher : —‘The future of the world is written, for God has granted their prayer to men. Ha has made them rich, and their riches shall kill them. When all green places have been destroyed in the builders’ lust for gain ; when all lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood and iron ; when there is no moisture anywhere and uo rain ever falls ; when the sky is a vault of smoke, and the rivers reek with poison ; when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things banished and forgotten; when every gentle, timid thing of brake and and bush, of air or water, has been killed, because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit; when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the stream, and know no music but the roar of the furnace ; when the old sweet silence of the country aide, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead and remembered of no man ; —then the world, like an Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere —gold that the people can neither eat nor drink ; gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly ; gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, holiness and liberty ; gold that is one vast grave.’