To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard,
With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs,
Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard!

"Aye! we had a glorious gallop after `Starlight' and his gang,
When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat;
How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang
To the strokes of `Mountaineer' 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