"We come to stay,"--a boast which it manfully kept for several
years. As I lift my eyes from this paper, they rest on no less than ten
great half-yearly volumes, which flash "The Dawn"--"The Dawn"--along a
darksome folio shelf, as they have flashed it week after week across
darkest Coalchester; and "The Dawn" ceased, at length, not from lack of
power and encouragement to continue, but because the world had grown
sadder by then, and it had lost the will to go on living.

In spite of this hardy existence, I suppose "The Dawn" will win no
record of itself in the histories of the press, though merely as
spirited journalism it deserves to do so; while in the history of the
human spirit at Coalchester it demands a grateful celebration such as it
will, again, most surely not receive from the literary and philosophical
historian of the town. At all events, honoured or forgotten as it may
be, should you ever come across its strange young pages, I know you will
agree with me that it was a wonderful little paper. It was not, you may
suspect, conservative, being, as it was, very alive and very young. In
fact, its radiant radicalism brings tears to one's eyes to-day, when so
many of the noble ideals it championed, to the length and strength of
its little angry arm, are lying smashed beneath the iron blows of the
capitalism that has outlived even the noble eloquence of Theophilus
Londonderry.

Like all young people, it was all for the young, the new; and I think
you will be astonished, if you do ever turn over its pages, at the
remarkable instinct for the crescent life possessed by these young men;
and, were it worth while, I could easily prove that several of the more
exquisite continental writers, now the fashion this many a year, first
found a humble welcome in that quaint little organ of New Zion.

Yes! it was a triumph for New Zion too. This modest and hitherto obscure
corner of the town suddenly found itself, comparatively, in a blaze of
publicity, for a column headed "Work at New Zion," evidently meant to be
weekly, left no doubt from what quarter of the town the dawn was to be
looked for. This was perhaps the most delightful thing about the
paper,--its calm assumption that the real aristocracy of the town was to
be found in that little back street, and that, if Coalchester was to
have any spiritual or intellectual life, it must seek it there. In Zion
Street, and nowhere else in Coalchester, were the angels descending into
t