HOMEWARD BOUND.

[Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers.]

Again the enormous poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in order inverse; again is the islandLitany of the Saints repeated for us, but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to receive us; each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow, then vapory gray, then ghostly blue, but always sharply radiant at last, symmetrically exquisite, as if chiselled out of amethyst and emerald and sapphire. We review the same wondrous wrinkling of volcanic hills, the cities that sit in extinct craters, the woods that tower to heaven, the peaks perpetually wearing that luminous cloud which seems the breathing of each island-life,its vital manifestation.

. . . Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar impressions received begin to group and blend, to form homogeneous results-general ideas or convictions. Strongest among these is the belief that the white race is disappearing from these islands, acquired and held at so vast a cost of blood and treasure. Reasons almost beyond enumeration have been advanced economical, climatic, ethnical, political-all of which contain truth, yet no single one of which can wholly explain the fact. Already the white West Indian populations are diminishing at a rate that almost staggers credibility. In the island paradise of Martinique in 1848 there were 12,000 whites; now, against more than 160,000 blacks and half-breeds, there are perhaps 5,000 whites left to maintain the ethnic struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less. Many of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate; Tobago is a ruin; St. Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Granada has lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous, the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full decadence. And while the white element is disappearing, the dark races are multiplying as never before; the increase of the negro and half-breed populations has been everywhere one of the startling results

of emancipation. The general belief among the creole whites of the Lesser Antilles would seem to confirm the old prediction that the slave races of the past must become the masters of the future. Here and there the struggle may be greatly prolonged, but everwhere the ultimate result must be the same, unless the present conditions of commerce and production become marvellously changed. The exterminated Indian people of the Antilles have already been replaced by populations equally fitted to cope with the forces of the Nature about them that splendid and terrible Nature of the tropics. which consumes the energies of the races of the North, which devours all that has been accomplished by their heroism or their crimes-effacing their cities, rejecting their civilization. To those people physiologically in harmony with this Nature belong all the chances of victory in the contest-already begun-for racial supremacy.

But with the disappearance of the white populations the ethnical problem would be still unsettled. Between the black and mixed peoples prevail hatreds more enduring and more intense than any race prejudices between whites and freedmen in the past; a new struggle for supremacy could not fail to begin, with the perpetual augmentation of numbers, the ever-increasing competition for existence. And the true black element, more numerically powerful, more fertile, more cunning, better adapted to pyrogenic climate and tropical environment, would surely win. All these mixed races, all these beautiful fruit- colored populations, seem doomed to extinction; the future tendency must be to universal blackness, if existing conditions continue-perhaps to universal savagery. Everywhere the sins of the past have borne the same fruit, have furnished the colonies with social enigmas that mock the wisdom of legislators, -a dragon-crop of problems that no modern political science has yet proved competent to deal with. Can it even be hoped that future sociologists will be able to answer them, after Nature-who never forgives-shall have exacted the utmost possible retribution for all the crimes and follies of three hundred years?—Two Years in the French West Indies.

HEBER, REGINALD, an English clergyman and poet, born at Malpas, Cheshire, April 21, 1783; died at Trichinopoly, India, April 2, 1826. In 1800 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1803 he wrote his prize poem, Palestine, which has been pronounced the best poem of the kind ever produced at Oxford. After taking his degree in 1804, he travelled in Germany, Russia, and the Crimea. In 1807 he was presented by his brother, Richard Heber, the noted bibliomaniac, to the living of Hodnet, in Shropshire, and in 1809, married Amelia Shipley, daughter of the Dean of St. Asaph. In 1815 he preached the Bampton Lecture, his subject being "The Personality and Office of the Christian Comforter." In 1819 he wrote a Life of Jeremy Taylor, with a critical examination of his writings, and in 1822 was appointed preacher at Lincoln's Inn. In 1823 he accepted the appointment of Bishop of Calcutta, this see then including all British India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and Australia. From the time of entering upon his episcopal duties he was occupied with visitations through parts of his vast diocese. He wrote a Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India, which was not published until after his death. His Life and Unpublished Works, edited by his widow, appeared in 1830. His Hymns were first published entire in 1827.

JERUSALEM.

Reft of thy sons, amid thy foes forlorn,
Mourn, widowed Queen! forgotten Sion, mourn!
Is this thy place, sad city, this thy throne,
Where the wild desert rears its craggy stone?
While sons unblest their angry lustre fling,

And wayworn pilgrims seek the scanty spring?
Where now thy pomp, which kings with envy viewed?
Where now thy might, which all those kings subdued ?
No martial myriads muster in thy gate;

No suppliant nations in thy temple wait;
No prophet-bards, the glittering courts among,
Wake the full lyre, and swell the tide of song:
But lawless Force and meagre Want are there,
And the quick-darting eye of restless Fear,
While cold Oblivion, mid thy ruins laid,
Folds his dank wing beneath the ivy shade.

-From Palestine.

THE MOONLIGHT MARCH.

I see them on their winding way,
About their ranks the moonbeams play;
Their lofty deeds and daring high,
Blend with the notes of victory.

And waving arms and banners bright,
Are glancing in the mellow light :

They're lost, and gone; the moon is past,

The wood's dark shade is o'er them cast;
And fainter, fainter, fainter still
The March is rising o'er the hill.

Again, again, the pealing drum,

The dashing horn: they come, they come !
Through rocky pass, o'er woody steep,
In long and glittering files they sweep;
And nearer, nearer, yet more near,
Their softened chorus meets the ear.
Forth, forth and meet them on their way;
The trampling hoofs brook no delay;
With thrilling fife and pealing drum,

And clashing horn, they come; they come!

TO HIS WIFE.

If thou wert by my side, my love,
How fast would evening fall,
In green Bengala's palmy grove,
Listening the nightingale!

If thou, my love, wert by my side,
My babies at my knee,

How gayly would our pinnace glide
O'er Gunga's mimic sea!

I miss thee at the dawning gray,
When on our deck reclined,
In careless ease my limbs I lay,
And woo the cooler wind.

I miss thee when by Gunga's stream
My twilight steps I guide,

But most beneath the lamp's pale beam
I miss thee from my side.

I spread my books, my pencil try,
The lingering noon to cheer,
But miss thy kind approving eye,
Thy meek attentive ear.

But when of morn and eve the star
Behold me on my knee,

I feel, though thou art distant far,
Thy prayers ascend for me.

Then on then on! where duty leads,
My course be onward still,

O'er broad Hindostan's sultry meads,
O'er bleak Almorah's hill.

That course, nor Delhi's kingly gates,
Nor wild Malwah detain;

For sweet the bliss us both awaits

By yonder western main.

Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say,

Across the dark-blue sea;

But ne'er were hearts so light and gay

As then shall meet in thee!