ROMANCE.

Old orchard crofts of Picardy,
In the high warm winds of May,
Tossed into blossomed billowings,

And spattered the roads with spray. Over the earth the scudding cloud,

And the laverock whistling high, Lifted the drooping heart of the lad

At one bound to the sky. France! France! and the old romance

Came over him like a spell; Homesickness and his weariness

Shook from him then and fell; For he was again with d'Artagnan,

With Alan Breck and d'Artagnan; And the pipes before him gleefully Were playing airs of Pan.

Through dust that in a mist uprose

From under the tramping feet, He saw old storied places, dim

In the haze of the summer heat. Menace and ambush, wounds and death,

Lurked in the ditch and wood, But he, high-breasted, walked in joy With a glorious multitude; Great hearts that never perish,

Nor grow old with the aches of Time, Marched through the morning with him,

All in a magic clime;

But loved of all was d'Artagnan,
And Alan the kith of kings,
Fond comrades of his childhood's days,
Still on their wanderings.

From miry clefts of the wintry plain
He leapt with his platoon,
The morion on his forehead,

And the soul of him at noon;
With head high to the hurricane

He walked, and in his breast He knew himself immortal,

And that death was but a jest. A smile was on his visage

When they found him where he fell, The gallant old companions,

In an amaranthine dell.

"Lad o' my heart!" cried Alan Breck,

"Well done thy first campaign!"

"Sleep thou till morn," said d'Artagnan "When we three march again!" Neil Munro.

Blackwood's Magazine.

TO THE MEN WHO HAVE DIED FOR ENGLAND.

All ye who fought since England was a

name,

Because Her soil was holy in your

eyes;

Who heard Her summons and confessed Her claim,

Who flung against a world's timehallow'd lies

The truth of English freedom-fain to give

Those last lone moments, careless of

your pain,

Knowing that only so must England live

And win, by sacrifice, the right to

reign

Be glad, that still the spur of your bequest

Urges your heirs their threefold way

along

The way of Toil that craveth not for rest,

Clear Honor, and stark Will to

punish wrong!

The seed ye sow'd God quicken'd with His Breath;

The crop hath ripen'd-lo, there is no death!

Punch.

AT LAST POST. Come home!-Come home! The winds are at rest in the restful trees;

At rest are the waves of the sundown seas;

And home-they're home

The wearied hearts and the broken lives

At home! At ease!

W. E. K.

Killed in action, April, 1917.

The Poetry Review.

The United States and the United Kingdom are at last allies. Now that the Anglo-Saxon schism is healed, it is curious to trace "the silent illwill," which, Granville realized in 1870, was endangering the friendship of the two great branches of the English-speaking race, and to note how the twain were so long kept asunder, whom Mr. Wilson has joined together. The United States represent politically the lost tribes, the voluntary irredenti of the AngloSaxons. England has had to relinquish conquered country, but only once her own colonized soil, earth of her earth, name of her name, blood of her blood. She lost New England because her bonds were selfish and commercial and not sentimental and maternal. Only a colossal new ideal could rebridge the chasm. Only an England remote from Georgian tyranny and Victorian commercialism can today approach the gates of America, where the statue of Liberty is no less a symbol of national religion than one of the deified abstractions of the Roman world. "Great is Liberty of the Americans!"

Though England learned the lesson of the Revolution, the unity of the English-speaking world had passed away. In vain the Empire gathered in the ends of the earth and added the Tropics to the Antarctics. In vain the imperial growths of India, Australia and Africa. The Colonies, filled with the strongest blood of England, Ireland and Scotland, remained aloof, estranged, sarcastic, suspicious and often hostile. In his efforts to possess the earth the AngloSaxon overreached himself. The conquest of a Canada which was fairly French helped the loss of the English Colonies. A French neighbor would

have strengthened New England loyalty as Japan consolidates that of New South Wales today. With Canada conquered, the necessity of defense in New England was replaced by the possibility of defiance. By the Quebec Act establishing Canadian Catholicism, mistrust in New England was generated, lest Bishops might be set up over Puritan Colonies. AntiBritish and anti-Catholic sentiment coalesced where a century later the anti-British feeling owing to Irish grievance became largely Catholic. The Tories (which in America means those loyal to King George) were adherents of Anglicanism, which suffered an eclipse. The Colonial dislike of Catholicism was neutralized by a rebel contingent and the coming of the French aid. The Catholic Carrolls of Maryland tried to win over Canada, but Bishop Briand, who had been under the fleur-de-lis, kept French Canada to the English monarchy. Catholics rallied to the American Revolution as they could not to the French. America adopted a practical Liberty rather than a theoretical Reason as her ideal. The French Revolution bred an Empire which perished by fire and snow in Muscovy. The American created a Republic which seems one of the enduring institutions upon earth-from the snows of Alaska to the fiery plains of Texas.

The new Republic bred a type of transatlantic manhood often misunderstood and therefore unappreciated by Englishmen. The reverence of the older Puritan combined with the daring of the younger son. A superman, politically a Republican, racially aristocratic, loomed on the horizon of a virgin continent. But this eugenic dream which is reflected

in the kinder caricatures of "Uncle Sam," was cut short by the suicidal Civil War. The wiry-limbed, awkward giant with blue eyes and a light goatee, for whom visitors seek New York in vain, was the most promising type on earth. Hardy and untrammeled, he tore up Colonial tyranny, broke the Hessian hirelings, won the naval duel of 1812 and practically succumbed to the ghastly Epic of the Civil War. Cobbett early recognized that "this country of the best and boldest seamen and of the most moral and happy people in the world is also the home of the tallest and ablestbodied men in the world." Meredith, too, commented on the Yankee Generals of the Civil War: "They are of a peculiarly fine cast and show the qualities of energy and skill and also race. Place our best men alongside them and start!" Though his stock in trade was a continent, Uncle Sam had to make his own way in the world, for he was without friends. His assets were a republican idealism taken from what was sane in philosophical France, a seamanship inherited from England, and a visionary connection with Ireland that drew and had drawn all that was best from that admiring island. In spite of hard work and scanty livelihood, the "strait" American worked out his culture. His was the all-round type which it was said "could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet and play the violin." In spite of the bitter family grudge, the forms of law, religion and politics remained Anglo-Saxon under the republican husk. Distance slaked the antagonism of the two countries. Besides, each was supremely engaged, the English in a struggle with Napoleon, the American with Nature. The Anglo-Saxon conquered both.

But in 1812 a clash occurred.

England, at death grips with the French, needed sailors of the old stock. Necessity brought the English to adopt the Mare Clausum of Selden while freedom impelled the Americans to uphold the Grotian ideal of a Mare Liberum. England claimed the right of search and impressed some two thousand American seamen, many drawn from the best families, into her ships. It was true that deserters often concealed themselves under false papers, but more often Americans were kidnapped under false pretenses. The American frigates, like the yachts of later day, challenged the mother country. Every American schoolboy knows how Captain Decatur said "My country right or wrong," and how he riddled the Macedonian, and how the Constitution sank the Guerrière. English boys recall only the exploit by which Captain Broke of the Shannon destroyed the Chesapeake off Boston while

The people of the port came out to see the sport,

With the music playing Yankee-doodle dandy oh!

Naval honors went to America. The Anglo-Saxon, after littering the sea with Spanish, Dutch and French wreckage, was hoist by his own petard, whipped at sea by his own whelps. If many American citizens were serving impressed on English ships, Decatur had old tars of Nelson on his. The last English survivor of these sea duels died so lately as in 1892. One of the most successful of the American commanders was Commodore Stewart, the grandfather of Parnell. If the war did not quench bitterness, it evoked a mutual respect. Henceforth English sea-captains had to admit an equality of quality. On land the English were successful in taking the Capitol, and an Irish family added the Bladensburg victory

to their name; but at New Orleans the victory went to the Americans also under Irish leadership. The Treaty of Ghent initiated the peace between the two countries. It was interesting that an Adams sat on each side of the table. English statesmen were to learn respect for that shrewd but courteous family, oldfashioned heralds of the future, who faced them in each Anglo-American crisis. England, with Waterloo on the horizon, soon forgot the war; but for two generations the ogre of American nurseries remained the hated

"Britisher."

American nationalism

developed a violent hue against the background of British rivalry. Madison was the last President to be actually at war with England. Monroe, his successor, devised a far subtler weapon against European interference, the Monroe Doctrine. Originally shafted at a hint from Canning against Spain, it was in coming time to check England herself-an arrow tipped with her own feathers. Though English statesmen would only consider it "the dictum of its distinguished author," and Lord Salisbury was to deny its international legality, the Doctrine has proved stronger than the sword. At the time Brougham declared that "No event has dispersed greater joy, exultation and gratitude over all the freemen of Europe." It saved South America from the "holy alliance" of Romanoff, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern.

Henceforth there were to be bitternesses enough, disputes many, threatenings some; but bloodshed never again. The Monroe Doctrine was the pledge. However popular and political it was to "twist the lion's tail" there remained a subconscious reservation against war. Mill gave it expression: "A war between Great Britain and the United States would give a new lease to tyranny and bigotry wherever

they exist and would throw back the progress of mankind for generations"— a corollary to the dictum of Monroe! If a common tongue was a constant adjuration against war, it was not the less provocative of quarrels. And quarrels there arose in plenty about boundaries and ships, about seals in the Behring Sea, about Fenians in prison, about Oregon and Alaskaand even about yacht races. Every now and again a treaty cleared off outstanding difficulties. The Maine boundary was settled by Webster, the American Dr. Johnson, and Lord Ashburton, but the joint occupation of Oregon raised a party cry of "Fiftyfour-forty (latitude) or fight." Pakenham foolishly refused President Polk's offer of the forty-ninth latitude. Secretary Buchanan entertained the original idea of making the Pope arbitrator as between two heretical governments. In the end, Aberdeen compromised on the forty-ninth latitude, which gave Vancouver to England. Buchanan became a successful and the first popular minister at St. James's, though Palmerston, the jealous foe of America, at one time threatened his dismissal. It was Crampton, however, the minister in Washington, who was dismissed for recruiting during the Crimean War-"offered as a sacrifice to the Irish vote," says Lord Newton in his able Life of Lyons. Though he had become a personal friend of Victoria, Buchanan returned to become President. He invited the Prince of Wales to visit the land of his ancestors, so to speak. By planting a tree at Washington's grave the Prince was believed to have buried "the last faint trace of discord" between the two countries. But the Civil War, to which Buchanan's feeble policy to the South largely led, destroyed the good feeling at its best and left behind the resentment of a generation.

America originally quarreled with King and Tory, not with Radical and people. Liberalism always remained a tie between the countries. Catholic Emancipation and Chartism were regarded as complimentary to Americanism. This accounts for the division of English opinion during the war, though the perplexed Republic believed Christian civilization was involved in its cause. England would not realize slavery was at the bottom of the war. The irony was that England by one of the few disinterested acts in history had already freed her own slaves. Slavery had been previously forced on the colonies by the mother country but slavery exacted its final retribution of blood from the States alone. Yet Bristol had deserved the fate of Richmond. The North believed that her cause was divine, and that her legions were treading the winepress of the Lord. Yet she met with less than sympathy from the land whose flag was pledged to the ethics of her cause. The issue was as Rhodes, the American historian, puts it. The South was "the only community of the Teutonic race which did not deem human slavery wrong." However, England practically recognized the South as a belligerent, rather than as a rebel against a friendly power, and showed a hostility to the North that even Lincoln's emancipation of the negro did not wholly remove. It was true, Lincoln did not interfere with slavery at the outset, and it remained indefinitely guaranteed by Congress; but it was for those with eyes to see to be sure that slavery and the Confederacy must perish together. Unfortunately, Russell preferred to think the North was fighting for Empire, and the South for Independence; and Gladstone by a serious mistake declared Jeff Davis had created a nation. The result was that the friendly North became hostile, and

the South, which had disliked England as presumably Abolitionist, reversed her feelings.

The English aristocracies of blood and letters followed the politicians. Freeman began the History of Federalism until the "disruption of the United States." Carlyle thought the war of liberation "a smoky chimney which had taken fire." The surrender of Lee was felt as a sorrow by Lord Acton. Nevertheless, the North had friends strong, stern and staunch in England, Argyll, Whewell, Leslie Stephen, Milner Gibson, and chiefly John Bright, who smote "the devilish delusion that slavery was a divine institution." Lincoln pardoned a British privateer "as a mark of the esteem held by the United States for the high character and steady friendship of John Bright." It was a pity that Bright could not afterwards have visited America as envoy, where he was promised "flowers from Chicago to the sea." The religious Democrat is the type of Englishman who has always appealed most deeply to the real American people, Bright, Shaftesbury, Gordon or Havelock, at whose death in India the flags in New York harbor were lowered. Bright's name still does service in America. The corresponding heroes of the North made no appeal to Englishmen until after their death. John Brown, whose soul the Northern armies invoked on the march, seemed a mixture of Pilgrim Father and mad dog, for whose ecstasy the noose made the best muzzle. General Grant was far from seeming the ideal of the Horse Guards. By descent "a hard Scotch pebble," with a Kelly grandmother, he was inexorable without bravado, and patient without complacency; but he looked seedy and scrubby beside the cavalier Lee.

Lincoln was only seen in a haze of caricature. He came to the White House "a backwoods Jupiter,"