512 Transactions. 



tkis being the metre of Gilbert's 



(8.) From a cheap/ and chippy cho/pper on a b'g/, black block/. 



Here '"' passed, round " and " black block " are almost identical with " old 

 Night." 



^C'^ 



5. The following is half of the second stanza of " The Sick Stockrider " : — 



(9.) Now westward winds the bridle-path that leads to Lmdisfarm, 

 And yonder looms the double-headed Bluff; 

 From the far side of the first hill, when the skies are clear and calm. 

 You can see Sylvester's woolshed fair enough. 



In this stanza, as has been noted above, the dropping of stresses is not so 

 pronounced as in Paterson's stanza (6), but no reader would give the even 

 stresses the same value as the odd ones, and in parts of the stanza every 

 reader would suppress certain of them — 



(9rt.) From the far side of the first hill, when the skies are clear and calm, 



Furtheimore. the dropping of the even stresses in Gordon's stanza gives us 

 lines of four and three stresses alternately ; giving every stress full value, 

 the lines are of seven and five stresses alternately — a very rare combination. 

 By dropping the alternate stresses, however, a pure ballad stanza results ; 

 a most unusual metre is changed to one most familiar, its only strangeness 

 on first reading being its quadruple units. The Australian has, indeed, 

 adopted the favourite measure of his ancestors, changing its externals, but 

 not its essentials, in the process of acclimatisation. 



6. In Paterson's stanza the odd stresses, but in Gordon's the even 

 stresses, are suppressed. Given its full tale of stresses, Paterson's stanza 

 wou\l be trochaic ; Gordon's, iambic. Of Gordon's four quadruple pieces, 

 two are in apparent iambs, one in trochees, whilst one is mixed ; of Pater- 

 son's and Lawson's forty quadruple pieces, three only are in iambs, thirty- 

 four in trochees, and three are mixed. Gordon has therefore been departed 

 from so far as the original metre is concerned : the trochaic measure resolved 

 itself into the quadruple much more frequently than the iambic. Tlie 

 reason probably is that in choosing the former, where the suppression of the 

 first stress gave an initial unit of three syllables, an easier transition to the 

 four-syllabled unit was obtained. The popularity of the quadruple metre 

 may be seen from the fact that in Paterson's two volumes of verse, " The 

 Man from Snowy River " and " Rio Grande's Last Ride," in eighty-one 

 pieces twelve are quadruple ; in Lawson's two volumes, " \\\ the Days when 

 the World was Wide " and " Verses Popular and Humorous," in or.e 

 hundred and fourteen pieces twenty-eight are quadruple ; Ogilvie, in " Fair 

 Girls and Grey Horses," has eleven in a hundred ; Boake, in " Where the 

 Dead Men Lie," has four in thirty-two ; Brunton Stephens, in " Poetical 

 Works." has the high average of twelve in fifty-se\en. 



j^i.j7. Two quotations may be taken as contrasts of the original metre 

 and its Australian development. \\\ Kendall's imaginative and musical 

 poem " Hy-Brasil " occur the lines, — 



(10.) There indeed was singing Eden, where the great gold river runs 



Past the porch and gates of crystal, ringed by strong and shining ones ! 

 There indeed was God's own garden, sailing down the sapphire sea — 

 Lawny dells and slo])es of summer, dazzling stream and radiant tree ! 



Here it is impossible, except in perhaps two instances, to slur or suppress- 

 the odd stresses ; but read in the same full-stressed way the following from 



