WAIKATO.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 1600, 31 May 1924, Page 13 (Supplement)

WAIKATO.

A REAL HOMELAND, (By Darius.) We only realise, joy as we do beauty, through contrast, and surely there could be no other sphere comparable to earth for contrast, variety, and sweet changefulness. Often when present in this district, and more acutely so when I am absent from it, I think of the wonderful beauty of Hamilton and its surroundings, the placid lake moving off m silent ripples to deep shadow under trees 014. the western shore,' moor merging into wold, and wold into mountain, culminating in old Pirongia, purple under the evening clouds, changing, eternally changing, never twice the same in a generation, in an aeon, in an eternity, with, underneath, the homes of men—nothing incongruous, but seeming as if created a part of the scene. Beautiful pastoral country out there between the watertower and the mountain country that has the grace and composure to look as if it had never looked otherwise. The Old Basin. It is not so all around, for there are plaoes that appear desecrated and devastated —raw sores on the landscape, that it will take generations to heal, but the old basin under the circling rampart, of hills is beautiful beyond the power of words to express, most of all beautiful with trees —trees that make earth aware of the beauty with which it is clothed. The old workshop basin is a good workshop and it is a good playground. It, is a country that, seems to dream of its English Motherland, bountifully dowered with serene beauty, and lacking in nothing, at all but the "wakeful nightingale."

Patriotism. By long association with a place, by long residence in a locality, surely one becomes brother to . the scene. Surely some spiritual essence from beautiful surroundings enters the soul and will survive bodily dissolution. Even those who are already dead do not seem to me as departed. There were many good men and good women among them and the good of them is still living and re-vitalising and re-animating us. Strange what a hold a locality can obtain upon a man, yet not strange when we understand the meaning of patriotism, the love of the crofter for his barren croft, the love of the hillman for his hills, the love of the viking for the creek, the estuary, the shore, the love of the clansman for glen and scaur, the love of son for Fatherland, If there can be anything estimable about the modern Hun, it is his love and devotion to the Vateriand, and when all the bad that can be spoken of him has been said and all (he willing ill we can do him has been done, I am strangely moved in listening lo the song of,his dead (no, not dead, hut warily asleep) ambition. "The Watch on the Rhine." The Best Loyalty. Patriotism is the best form of loyalty. A man who has a heart full of love for his country cannot be a bad man, and a man who has learned to greatly love his adopted , country cannot be a bad man, but a man who loves his own and hales his adopted country and all other, countries is essentially a bad man- 1 believe our minds revert to Eden so often because we feel that we, through our first parents, have been exiled from it. For all the myth of it our hearts go back to wander there amid its excellence and its purity. It may be as well that we cannot now visit its desecrated and once beautiful groves; well that they cannot, again be profaned by human footfalls of the curious crowd; well that the four great rivers are no more and that it has been blotted out forever and more completely than than great and fallen Babylon; well that it has become a sacred memory—a place where God walked in the cool of the evening after he had breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of man. Presently, how beautiful must it have been in the eventimc when the firmament glowed with living sapphire and

'Hesperus that ted

The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,

Rising in clouded majesty, at length, Apparent Queen! unveiled her precious light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw." Loyal! We are more loyal to our myths' than to lur realities, for we are a fanciful and not a soul-less people. Sacred Places. There are so many sacred places upon earth one almost wishes that the great mountain monarch, Everest, the boast of earth and the wonder of the heavens should remain sacrosanct — free from desecration by a plague of men —at least one pure altar lighted only by the stars of heaven, clothed only in the grandeur and purity of the eternal snows. Leave us, we say, some fame upon earth that' has escaped the contagion of the fall, and the vulgarity of curious humanity. We do not look upon our beloved Waikato as profaned by human associations. That has already been said in a different way. It is fulfilling its destiny like a field the Lord hath blessed, and surely there can be nothing sweeter. Leaving it for other scenes we feel I

" As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage The eyes of men Arc idly bent on him that enters next."

It is a sacred place. It looks such a homeland. We have much to say about the grandeur touched with terror, of Everest, of the wonders of Alp and Matterhorn. ol' lion Is, of sound, and lak<\ and mountain tarn, hut after all, .we could not live there; we, would not it we could, just because we should pine for one own sylvan and beautiful ' and beloved homeland.