aineer' and 'Acrobat';
Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,
Close behind them through the tea-tree scrub we dashed;
And the golden-tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath!
And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crash'd!"

This is genuine. There is no "poetic evolution from the depths of
internal consciousness" here. The writer has ridden his ride as well as
written it.

The student of these unpretending volumes will be repaid for his labour.
He will find in them something very like the beginnings of a national
school of Australian poetry. In historic Europe, where every rood of
ground is hallowed in legend and in song, the least imaginative can find
food for sad and sweet reflection. When strolling at noon down an
English country lane, lounging at sunset by some ruined chapel on the
margin of an Irish lake, or watching the mists of morning unveil Ben
Lomond, we feel all the charm which springs from association with the
past. Soothed, saddened, and cheered by turns, we partake of the varied
moods which belong not so much to ourselves as to the dead men who, in
old days, sung, suffered, or conquered in the scenes which we survey.
But this our native or adopted land has no past, no story. No poet
speaks to us. Do we need a poet to interpret Nature's teachings, we
must look into our own hearts, if perchance we may find a poet there.

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the
dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry--Weird Melancholy. A poem
like "L'Allegro" could never be written by an Australian. It is too
airy, too sweet, too freshly happy. The Australian mountain forests are
funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to
stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender
sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is
mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian
forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts.
From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very
animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly.
Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of
white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly
sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human
laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the
bottomless depth of s