NOMADS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11507, 1 October 1915, Page 4

NOMADS.

The human _ being is, after all, a nomad by instince, and also by perrr<i.cfion, it would appear, of his two legs. A human being is not a. vegetable that can exist only in a garden. Ho is enabled to get about. Tlu* wisest men of old, whose wisdom has hardly been improved upon, were often dwellers in tents, following the green trail of good pasture lands. Hcmor, great founder of modern literature, in that he has fed the culture of twenty centuries, did not dawdlo under an ancestral roof tree. Seven cities contended for the honour of having produced him, since he was really but a wandering minstrel. His epicj continued to vander as he had done. It reversed the saying about the rolling stone, in the rich accretions ; t took on in passing from lip to lip, before it found a resting place between book covers. Dante is a most famous and familiar type of how greatness grows in wandering, and the Elizabethan age in literature was a great wander-year of the AngloSaxons, who, by many a significant exodus, have so largely peopled the world. Perhaps, then, modern restlessness has not differed so much from that of old,, and has expressed more than mere" discontent. When men have put their girdle round the earth they find that human existence wears much the same face. And the answer is, no doubt, that the thing to do is to seek out real abiding place, a city that hath foundations.