Tasmania is more than one hundred and four thousand, and that the total
area of the island is nearly seventeen million acres, great part of
which is suitable for the growth of wheat and other grain. Less hot and
dry than Australia, Tasmania (or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was formerly
called) has a very salubrious climate, and is, we are informed, ‘an
excellent breeding-station for stud stock for all the Australian
continent, especially as regards animals of large muscular development,
and of the hardy constitution so requisite in the ox, the mutton-sheep,
and the draught-horse.’ The best evidence that the Tasmanian climate
deserves all that has been said in its favour is to be found in the
fact, that the mortality of children, especially of infants under
twelve months, is very small.
THE TWO ROSES.
Two roses once in my garden grew:
The one was brilliant and rich of hue;
Proud of her beauty and perfume rare,
She spread her sweets to each passing air:
The other, timid and chaste of mind,
Shrank from the kiss of the fickle wind;
Proud in the pride of her virtue meek,
She veiled the blush on her modest cheek.
Dazed with the glare of her gaudy bloom,
Drunk with the breath of her rich perfume,
I tended the one with ceaseless care;
I marked the growth of each beauty rare,
And dreamed that all on some future day
Would own the power of her peerless sway.
At length my flower, that I loved the best,
I sought to take and wear on my breast,
That won from her parent stem to part,
She might rest awhile on my loving heart.
But flown was the lure of her witching spell,
As fluttering to earth her petals fell;
Her heart was rotten and dead at the core—
And I knew that my foolish dream was o’er.
I saw how poor was the full-blown blaze
That had charmed my senses and won my praise;
And I thought at last of the timid flower
Which had pined unheeded for cooling shower,
But drought unslaked had her life-spring dried;
So, fading and faded, she drooped and died.
I saw too now, with awakening eyes,
How near I had been to my longed-for prize;
One half of the care I had spent in vain—
Care that had brought me but grief and pain—
If spent on the rose that had pined away,
Would have reared a flower so chastely gay,
That the joy of its countless charms untold
My care had repaid a thousandfold.
Ah! how oft in the toil and strife,
The chances and changes which we call life,
By slight and neglect in time of need,
We kill the flower, and we rear the weed;
Then when we see it, and know too late,
We blame not ourselves, but curse our fate,
For no solace have we on which to lean,
When we know what we long for might have been.
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