Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario — John Shaqi
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of OntarioScadding, Henry
History
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario
Scadding, Henry
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
"I dreamt not then that ere the rolling year
Had filled its circle, I should wander here
In musing awe; should tread this wondrous world,
See all its store of inland waters hurl'd
In one vast volume down Niagara's steep,
Or calm behold them, in transparent sleep,
Where the blue hills of old Toronto shed
Their evening shadows o'er Ontario's bed;
Should trace the grand Cadaraqui, and glide
Down the white rapids of his lordly tide.
Through massy woods, 'mid islets flowering fair,
And blooming glades, where the first sinful pair
For consolation might have weeping trod,
When banished from the garden of their God."
We can better picture to ourselves the author of Lalla Rookh floating on
the streams and other waters "of Ormus and of Ind," constructing verses
as he journeys on, than we can of the same personage on the St. Lawrence
in 1804 similarly engaged. "The Canadian Boat Song" has become in its
words and air almost a "national anthem" amongst us. It was written, we
are assured, at St Anne's, near the junction of the Ottawa and the St.
Lawrence.
Toronto should be duly appreciative of the distinction of having been
named by Moore. The look and sound of the word took his fancy, and he
doubtless had pleasure in introducing it in his verses addressed to Lady
Rawdon. It will be observed that while Moore gives the modern
pronunciation of Niagara, and not the older, as Goldsmith does in his
"Traveller," he obliges us to pronounce Cataraqui in an unusual manner.
Isaac Weld, it will have been noticed, also preferred the name Toronto,
in the passage from his Travels just now given, though writing after its
alteration to York. The same traveller moreover indulges in the
following general strictures: "It is to be lamented that the Indian
names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others.
Newark, Kingston, York, are poor substitutes for the original names of
the respective places, Niagara, Cataraqui, Toronto."
[Illustration]
"Dead vegetable matter made the humus; into that the roots of
the living tree were struck, and because there had been
vegetation in the past, there was vegetation in the future. And
so it was with regard to the higher life of a nation. Unless
there was a past to which it could refer, there would not be in
it any high sense of its own mission in the world. . . . . .
They did not want to bring the old times back again, but they
would understand the present around them far better if they
would trace the present back into the past, see what it arose
out of, what it had been the development of, and what it
contained to serve for the future before them."--_Bishop of
Winchester to the Archæological Institute, at Southampton, Aug.
1872._
[Illustration]
TORONTO OF OLD
I.
PALACE STREET TO THE MARKET PLACE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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