STARTLING PREDICTIONS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1708, 11 June 1884, Page 2

STARTLING PREDICTIONS.

A writer in a home paper gives the following from the pen of one of the most accomplished novelists of the day, who, "with a passionate love of beauty and an unequalled power of wordpainting," puts it into the mouth of a Norse poet and preacher:-" The future of the world is written, for God lms granted their prayer to" num. He,has made them rich, .and their riches shall kill them. When all green places have' been destroyed in the builders'lust for gain; when all lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood and iran; when there is no moisture anywhere, and no rain ever fulls; when the sky is a vault of smoke, and the rivers reek with poison; when forest and stream, arid moor and meadow, and all tfce old green wavside beauty are things banished and' for-, gotten; when every gentle, timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed, becauso it robbed them of a berry or a fruit; when the earth is one vast city, whoso young children behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the stream, and know no music but the roar of the furnace jwlu'ii the old sweet silence of the country side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row hough, and the glow of tho purple heather, and the note' of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, aro all tilings dead and remembered of no man;— then the world, like an Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere-gold that tho people can neither eat nor drink; gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly; gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, holiness and liberty; gold that is one vast grave."