Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 153.djvu/430

On a soil exposed to protracted droughts it is of prime importance that waste tracts should be clothed with wood in order to check evaporation, and the tendency of heavy rainfall to run off in destructive floods. But to attain this end the people must be brought to see that it is in their own interest to encourage the growth of young wood. At present it is considered an infringement of freedom to prevent anybody pasturing sheep or goats on any uncultivated land. Such trees as still remain on the hills are felled or lopped at random, the seedlings are browsed down, and millions of acres which might be made valuable woodland now grow nothing but mastic, cistus, and scrubby Aleppo pines. Education is free in Greece: it is not compulsory, because the peasantry are all anxious to have their children instructed: it would tend to increase enormously the wealth of the country could the rising generation be schooled into a knowledge of arboriculture, and induced to foster the natural reproduction of timber, and undertake the planting up of suitable tracts. The Government are liberal in the supply of young plants; it only requires that the young Greeks should be aroused to the importance of planting and protecting them, and so arrest the process of denudation by

There are those whose sense may be offended by all this stir of preparation and bustle of material concern which now echoes through this ancient realm, who sympathise with Mr Ruskin when, in one of his juvenile pieces, lately reprinted, he exclaims: " Who would substitute the rush of a new nation, the struggle of an awakening power, for the dreamy sleep of Italy's desolation, for her sweet silence of melancholy thought, her twilight time of everlasting memories?"

Surely there are few who will hesitate to reply that to open a future full of bright promise before a nation possessed of an immortal past, is to add the harmony of a full orchestra to the voice of one crying in the wilderness; and the English poet who, beyond all other singers, mourned for and celebrated the shattered grandeur of Greece, would be the first, were he present with her now, to beckon her onward in her confident renascence.