With the strokes of the flint axe
The blind woodland rings,
And the echoes laugh back as
The sylvan girl sings:-

And the Sabre-tooth growls in his lair ere he springs!

Like two stars of green splendour,

His great eyeballs burn

As he crawls!-Chilled to silence,
The girl can discern

The fierce pantings which thrill through the fronds of the fern.

And the brown frolic face of

The girl has grown white,

As the large fronds are swayed in

The weird crimson light,

And she sobs with the strained throbbing dumbness of fright.

With his blue eyes agleam, and

His wild russet hair

Streaming back, the Man travails,
Unwarned, unaware

Of the lithe shape that crouches, the green eyes that glare.

And now, hark! as he drives with

A last mighty swing

The stone blade of the axe through

The oak's central ring,

From the blanched lips what screams of wild agony spring!—

There's a rush thro' the fern fronds—

A yell of affright

And the Savage and Sabre-tooth

Close in fierce fight:

And the red sunset smoulders and blackens to night.

On the swamp in the forest

One clear star is shown,

And the reeds fill the night with

A long troubled moan

And the girl sits and sobs in the darkness, alone!

The great dim centuries of long ago

Sweep past with rain and fire, with wind and snow,
And where the Savage swung his axe of stone
The blue clay silts on Titan trunks o'erthrown,
O'er mammoth's tusks, in river-horse's lair;

And, armed with deer horn, clad in girdled hair,
A later Savage in his hollow tree

Hunts the strange broods of a primeval sea.

And yet the great dim centuries again

Sweep past with snow and fire, with wind and rain,
And where that warm primeval ocean rolled
A second forest buds,-blooms broad,-grows old;
And a new race of prehistoric men

Springs from the mystic soil, and once again

Fades like a wood mist thro' the woodlands hoar.

For lo! the great dim centuries once more
With wind and fire, with rain and snow sweep by;
And where the forest stood, an empty sky
Arches with lonely blue a lonely land.

The great white stilted storks in silence stand
Far from each other, motionless as stone,

And melancholy leagues of marsh-reeds moan,
And dead tarns blacken 'neath the mournful blue.

The ages speed! And now the skin canoe
Darts with swift paddle through the drear morass,
But ere the painted fisherman can pass,

The brazen horns ring out; a thund'rous throng-
Bronzed faces, brazen helmets-sweeps along,
The silver Eagles flash and disappear

Across the Roman causeway!

Year by year

The dim time lapses till that vesper hour
Broods o'er the summer lake with peaceful power,
When the carved galley through the sunset floats,
The rowers, with chains of gold about their throats,
Hang on their dripping oars, and sweet and clear
The sound of singing steals across the mere,
And rising with glad face and outstretched hand,
'Row, Knights, a little nearer to the land
And let us hear the monks of Ely sing;"
Says KNUT, the King.

In the dim years what fateful hour arrives,
And who is this rides Fenward from St. Ives?
A man of massive presence,-bluff and stern.
Beneath their craggy brows his deep eyes burn
With awful thoughts and purposes sublime.
The face is one to abash the front of time,—
Hewn of red rock, so vital, even now
One sees the wart above that shaggy brow.

At Ely there in these idyllic days

His sickles reap, his sheep and oxen graze,
And all the ambition of his sober life

Is but to please his children and his wife,

To drain the Fens-and magnify the Lord.

So in his plain cloth suit, with close-tucked sword,
OLIVER CROMWELL, fated but unknown,

Rides where the Savage swung his axe of stone.

In the class-room blue-eyed Phemie
Sits, half listening, hushed and dreamy,

To the gray-haired pinched Professor droning to his class of girls,

And around her in their places

Rows of arch and sweet young faces

Seem to fill the air with colour shed from eyes and lips and curls!—

Eyes of every shade of splendour,

Brown and bashful, blue and tender,

Grey and giddy, black and throbbing with a deep impassioned light:

Golden ringlets, raven clusters,

Auburn braids with sunny lustres

Falling on white necks, plump shoulders clothed in green and blue and white.

And the sun with leafy reflex

Of the rustling linden-tree flecks

All the glass doors of the cases ranged along the class-room wall—

Flecks with shadow and gold the Teacher's

Thin gray hair and worn pinched features,

And the pupils' heads, and sends a thrill of July over all.

And the leafy golden tremor
Witches so the blue-eyed dreamer

That the room seems filling straightway with a forest green and old.

And the gray Professor's speech is
Heard like wind among the beeches

Murmuring weird and wondrous secrets never quite distinctly told;
And the girls around seem turning
Into trees-laburnums burning,

Graceful ashes, silver birches-but thro' all the glamour and change

Phemie is conscious that those cases

Hold reliques of vanished races,

The preadamitic fossils of a dead world grim and strange.

Labelled shells suggest the motion,

Moan, and glimmer of that ocean

Where belemnites dropped their spindles and the sand-stars shed their rays;

Monstrous birds stalk stilted by as
She perceives the slab of Trias

Scrawled with hieroglyphic claw-tracks of the mesozoic days;

And before her she sees dawn a
Pageant of an awful fauna

While across Silurian ages the Professor's lecture blows.

All the while a soft and pleasant
Rustle of dresses, an incessant

Buzz of smothered frolic rises underneath his meagre nose.

And one pretty plague has during

All the class been caricaturing

Her short-sighted, good old Master with a world of wicked zest,

And the madcaps blush and titter
As they see the unconscious sitter

Sketched as Allophylian Savage-spectacled but much undressed.

But the old man turns the pages

Of the weird illumined ages,

Tracing from earth's mystic missal the antiquity of Man;

Not six thousand years-but eras,

Ages, eons disappear as

Groping back we touch the system where the Human first began.

Centuries, as we retrogress, are
Dwarfed to days, says the Professor,

And our lineage was hoary ere Eve's apple-tree grew green;

For the bee, whose drowsy humming
Was prophetic of Man's coming,

-Lies in gem-like tomb of amber, buried in the Miocene.

At what point man came, I know not,
Logic proves not, fossils show not,

But his dim remote existence is a fact beyond dispute.

Look! And from among some thirty
Arrow barbs of quartz and chert he

Takes the flint head of a hatchet,-and the girls grow hushed and mute.
Old, he says, art thou, strange stone! Nor
Less antique thy primal owner!

When the Fens were drained this axe was found below two forests sunk.

Underneath a bed of sea-clay
And two forests this relique lay

Where some Allophylian Savage left it in a half-hewn trunk

Does the old Professor notice
Large eyes, blue as myosotis,

Raised to him in startled wonder as those fatal words are said?

But for Phemie, thro' the trees in

Her dream forest, fact and reason

Blend with fancy, and her vision grows complete and clear and dread:

By the swamp in the forest

The sylvan girl sings

As his flint-headed hatchet

The wild Woodman swings,

But the hatchet cleaves fast in the trunk he has riven

The Man stands unarmed as the Sabré-tooth springs!

New Quarterly Magazine.

THE FRENCH REPUBLIC AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

It has never been a secret that the final establishment of the republic in France would be immediately followed by active measures in the sphere of national education. Activity in this direction inevitably, in England as in France, touches the passions and interests of the old teaching order. If a system of education is to be national, it must be organized; and if it is to be organized, it must cease to be sectarian, for the resources of the greatest sect are inadequate to the task, while to lend even to the greatest sect the resources of the State is inconsistent with the political ideas of modern times. It has been clearly foreseen, therefore, that the new republic would open its history by what could not be other than a bitter and prolonged struggle. The certainty of this was, of course, one of the causes of the hostility of the clergy

to the republic, throughout the last eight years. They were told with abundant candour what they had to expect. "The clergy," said M. Clemenceau, "must be taught that it is necessary to render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's; and that everything is Cæsar's." There was hardly an arrondissement in Paris where salvos of applause did not greet orators who said that they would not tolerate the priest in the family, in the school, or in any public function outside of the church. The further the speaker went at the meetings of the triumphant party, the louder the thunders of approval. In not a few places in Paris the spirit of Hébert or Chaumette re-appeared in full force. "What I want," said one citizen, "is the elimination of the churches." "Yes, yes," cried the audience, "no more churches! No more jésuitières ! Down with all that!"

All this might have been neglected as the common form of the Parisian democracy. It was impossible to neglect the utterances of M. Gambetta. It was impossible, too, to misunderstand them. In his famous speech at Bordeaux this is what he said: "I tell you that the urgent practical task of your representatives ought to be almost singly that of the organization in all degrees, from the point of view of the schools, from the point of view of programmes of instruction, from the point of view of means of study, from the point of view of finance ought to be to assure the constitution of national education; and if we work in concert to begin a reform of this kind, there is no other which ought to draw us away, because the others can wait." At Lille he went more directly to the mark. "They have dared, yes, they have dared, under the name of liberty of superior instruction to pass a law, the label on which is calculated to cheat simple people. Liberty has nothing to do with it. The law is an instrument of division.

The pupils who follow the new instruction will be brought up in the hatred of modern France, and the hatred of those principles of justice which form the base of our national laws. They will be brought up in their own country as if they were foreigners; it is émigrés and foes that will thus be formed in the midst of us; you will have sown a germ of discord and division, which, added to all the others, must inevitably lead to catastrophe and ruin." At Bordeaux, again, he branded the law that thus allows of the establishment of free universities in the hands of the clergy, as "a law of division, a law of retrogression, a law of hate, a law of disorganization, a law of moral anarchy for French society.'

Both parties then were aware what would follow the final defeat of the conspiracy of the sixteenth of May, the resignation of the Marshal, and the accession to power of the sincere republicans. The great educational campaign, of which our generation is perhaps not likely to see the end, would at once open. The new government lost no time in introducing their measure. If that measure had been very much more moderate than it is, it would probably have served equally well as a signal for conflagration. And the conflagration is now at red heat. In every newspaper the battle is raging. It is not merely the question