Work away!
      For the Leader's eye is on us,
      Never off us, still upon us,
            Night and day!
      Wide the trackless prairies round us,
      Dark and unsunned woods surround us,
      Steep and savage mountains bound us;
            Far away
      Smile the soft savannahs green,
      Rivers sweep and roll between:
            Work away!

      Bring your axes, woodmen true;
      Smite the forest till the blue
      Of Heaven's sunny eye looks through
      Every wild and tangled glade;
      Jungle swamp and thicket shade
            Give to day!
      O'er the torrents fling your bridges,
      Pioneers! Upon the ridges
      Widen, smoothe the rocky stair
      They that follow, far behind
      Coming after us, will find
      Surer, easier footing there;
      Heart to heart, and hand with hand,
      From the dawn to dusk o' day,
            Work away!
      Scouts upon the mountain's peak
      Ye that see the Promised Land,
      Hearten us! for ye can speak
      Of the country ye have scanned,
            Far away!

            Work away!
      For the Father's eye is on us,
      Never off us, still upon us,
            Night and Day!
            WORK AND PRAY!
      Pray! and Work will be completer;
      Work! and Prayer will be the sweeter;
      Love! and Prayer and Work the fleeter
            Will ascend upon their way!
      Fear not lest the busy finger
      Weave a net the soul to stay;
      Give her wings—- she will not linger;
      Soaring to the source of day;
      Cleaving clouds that still divide us
      From the azure depths of rest,
      She will come again! beside us,
      With the sunshine on her breast,
      Sit, and sing to us, while quickest
      On their task the fingers move,
      While the outward din wars thickest,
      Songs that she hath learned above.

      Live in Future as in Present;
      Work for both while yet the day
      Is our own! for Lord and Peasant,
      Long and bright as summer's day,
      Cometh, yet more sure, more pleasant,
      Cometh soon our Holiday;
            Work away!

EPPING FOREST.

THERE are few things which, for a long
time, have come upon us with a more unpleasant
surprise than the announcement, in
Parliament, by the Chief Commissioner of Woods
and Forests, of his intention to bring in a bill,
this Session, for the enclosure of Epping and
Hainault Forests. Is there, then, really to be
no more Epping Forest? Is that old
metropolitan chase to vanish as a thing of no more
earthly use, and to become only a name? Are
we so abundantly provided with open, free
spaces for the healthy exercise and recreation
of our enormously increasing London
population, that we can afford to destroy and blot
out for ever this noblest of all our parks
about the capital? Are we casting about
how to rectify the mistakes of our ancestors;
for which they themselves paid severely by
the terrific visitations of the Plague, and by
which they have left us a dismal heritage of
cholera and typhus? Are we purchasing land
at large cost, and pulling down houses at still
greater cost, to open up the dense and death-
producing masses of wretched tenements, to
furnish breathing places to our metropolitan
millions, in the heart of the city, at Victoria
Park and at Battersea—- and are we actually
contemplating, at the very same time, the
annihilation of the most inestimable expanse of open
land which nature and circumstances have left
us? Are we closing all our city burial-grounds,
and organising a magnificent scheme for
preventing, in future, the pestiferous presence of
corpses amongst us; and are we, with the
same hands, about, simultaneously, to close
up by hedge and ditch, and all the obstructive
influences of private property, the only spot
of any extent, where our pale and brick-and-
mortar haunted population can catch a glimpse
of real nature, and wander amid woods and
heaths, where they can feel themselves really
in the country?

For ourselves, putting these most conflicting
things together, we could scarcely believe our
eyes when we read that all the woods are to
be felled the very next autumn and winter,
preparatory to the process of enclosure. We
trust that there are tens of thousands who,
like us, regard the destruction of these
suburban forests as one of the severest and
most irreparable injuries which could befall
London. Let us recollect that, once done, this
thing can never be undone. A forest, with
all its air of antiquity, and its associations, is
not the growth of a day, a year, a century,
but of thousands of years. We may run up
piles of brick and mortar, and cover scores of
square miles with them, but we cannot thus
run up noble trees.

We have no species of architecture by
which we can erect oaks and beeches at will;
nor spread out their airy branches towards
heaven, clothe their giant boles with the
scars of a thousand tempests, and the
wrinkles of a thousand years. We may
weave Kidderminster carpets, but we
cannot weave a carpet of heather and moss,
and pour over it those delicate scents, the
secret of which mother Nature has reserved
in her own keeping, to cheer the souls and
invigorate the nerves of those who love her.
We may manufacture gas, and send it through
all the wondrous hidden veins of this huge
Babel; but the free elastic air which sweeps