in the colonies of a
very highly civilised country adverted to in a rather fanciful and
rationalistic connection with the desponding reply of the captive Jews
to their spoilers: 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange
land?' Ages, sometimes whole centuries, elapse, remarks the
commentator, ere the colonies of even eminently literary nations come
to possess poets and fine writers of their own. There is first a
struggle for bare existence among the colonists, during which the
higher branches of learning are necessarily neglected; and when a
better time at length comes, the general mind is found to have
acquired, during the struggle, a homely and utilitarian cast, which
militates against the right appreciation, and of course the
production, of what is excellent. And thus the true divinities of song
fail to be sung in a foreign land. There is, we doubt not, truth in
the remark, though somewhat quaintly expressed, and somewhat
doubtfully derived. The necessities of a colony in its youth, and the
peculiar cast of mind which they serve to induce, are certainly not
favourable to the development of poetic genius. But there is, alas!
another and more scriptural sense in which the 'Lord's song' too often
ceases to be sung in a strange land. We have already adverted to the
process of deterioration, moral and religious, through which it comes
to be silenced; and it is one of the advantages of the Otago scheme,
that it makes provision in, we believe, the most effectual way
possible, in the present divided state of Protestantism, for
preventing a result so deplorable. Youth is an important season, as
certainly in colonies as in individuals; and we question whether the
characteristic recklessness of Yankeeism in the far west and south may
not be legitimately traced to the neglected youthhead of the States in
which it is most broadly apparent. The deterioration of a single
generation left to run wild may influence for the worse, during whole
centuries, the character of a people; and who can predicate what these
colonies of the southern hemisphere are yet to become? They may be
great nations, influencing for good or evil the destinies of the
species in ages of the world when Britain shall have sunk into a
subordinate power, or shall have no name save in history. Those
records of the past, from which we learn that states and peoples, as
certainly as families and individuals, are born and die, and have
their times of birth and of