Part 2 (1/2)
For some time after 1793, official letters and other contemporary records exhibit in their references to the new site, the expressions, ”Toronto, now York,” and ”York, late Toronto.”
[Sidenote: 1795.]
The ancient appellation was a favorite, and continued in ordinary use.
Isaac Weld, who travelled in North America in 1795-7, still speaks in his work of the transfer of the Government from Niagara to Toronto.
”Niagara,” he says, ”is the centre of the _beau monde_ of Upper Canada: orders, however,” he continues, ”had been issued before our arrival there for the removal of the Seat of Government from thence to Toronto, which was deemed a more eligible spot for the meeting of the Legislative bodies, as being farther removed from the frontiers of the United States. This projected change,” he adds, ”is by no means relished by the people at large, as Niagara is a much more convenient place of resort to most of them than Toronto; and as the Governor, who proposed the measure, has been removed, it is imagined that it will not be put in execution.”
[Sidenote: 1803.]
In 1803-4, Thomas Moore, the distinguished poet, travelled on this continent. The record of his tour took the form, not of a journal in prose, but of a miscellaneous collection of verses suggested by incidents and scenes encountered. These pieces, addressed many of them to friends, appear now as a subdivision of his collected works, as Poems relating to America. The society of the United States in 1804 appears to have been very distasteful to him. He speaks of his experience somewhat as we may imagine the winged Pegasus, if endowed with speech, would have done of his memorable brief taste of sublunary life. Writing to the Hon.
W. R. Spencer, from Buffalo,--which he explains to be ”a little village on Lake Erie,”--in a strain resembling that of the poetical satirists of the century which had just pa.s.sed away, he sweepingly declares--
”Take Christians, Mohawks, Democrats, and all, From the rude wigwam to the congress-hall, From man the savage, whether slav'd or free, To man the civilized, less tame than he,-- 'Tis one dull chaos, one unfertile strife Betwixt half-polished and half-barbarous life; Where every ill the ancient world could brew Is mixed with every grossness of the new; Where all corrupts, though little can entice, And nought is known of luxury, but its vice!”
He makes an exception in a note appended to these lines, in favour of the Dennies and their friends at Philadelphia, with whom he says, ”I pa.s.sed the few agreeable moments which my tour through the States afforded me.” These friends he thus apostrophises:--
”Yet, yet forgive me, oh! ye sacred few, Whom late by Delaware's green banks I knew: Whom known and loved thro' many a social eve, 'Twas bliss to live with, and 'twas pain to leave.
Not with more joy the lonely exile scann'd The writing traced upon the desert's sand, Where his lone heart but little hoped to find One trace of life, one stamp of human kind; Than did I hail the pure, th' enlightened zeal, The strength to reason and the warmth to feel, The manly polish and the illumined taste, Which, 'mid the melancholy, heartless waste, My foot has traversed, oh! you sacred few, I found by Delaware's green banks with you.”
After visiting the Falls of Niagara, Moore pa.s.sed down Lake Ontario, threaded his way through the Thousand Islands, shot the Long Sault and other rapids, and spent some days in Montreal.
The poor lake-craft which in 1804 must have accommodated the poet, may have put in at the harbour of York. He certainly alludes to a tranquil evening scene on the waters in that quarter, and notices the situation of the ancient ”Toronto.” Thus he sings in some verses addressed to Lady Charlotte Rawdon, ”from the banks of the St. Lawrence.” (He refers to the time when he was last in her company, and says how improbable it then was that he should ever stand upon the sh.o.r.es of America):
”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 ma.s.sy 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 G.o.d.”
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 a.s.sured, 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 p.r.o.nunciation of Niagara, and not the older, as Goldsmith does in his ”Traveller,” he obliges us to p.r.o.nounce Cataraqui in an unusual manner.
Isaac Weld, it will have been noticed, also preferred the name Toronto, in the pa.s.sage 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 subst.i.tutes for the original names of the respective places, Niagara, Cataraqui, Toronto.”
[Ill.u.s.tration]
”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 Archaeological Inst.i.tute, at Southampton, Aug.
1872._
[Ill.u.s.tration]
TORONTO OF OLD