3o6 NEW SOUTH WALES. 



lovino" hand lias yet gathered together the fragments that remain of 

 that rich feast, scattered through many of the papers and periodicals 

 of his time — none perhaps now ever will. A project started shortly 

 after his death for some such monument to his memory appears to 

 have been abandoned, and the literary remains of perhaps the two 

 brightest intellects the country ever knew seem likely to be doomed 

 to rest together in that common grave where lie so many more such 

 treasures — the deep sea of journalism, which so seldom gives up its 

 dead. 



A happier fate has attended the two poets. Excellent posthumous 

 editions of both Harpur's and Kendall's poems, selected by careful 

 hands, have been published, and remain, as we said, so far as any 

 efforts of the local muse are concerned, unmatched. Possibly in some 

 quarters that may not be held very high praise. The local poet, like 

 the proverbial prophet, is apt to have little honor in his own country, 

 and outside criticism is often cai-eless, or ignorant, or worse. Thus it 

 has been objected to Australian poetry generally that it is lacking in 

 the true poet's first faculty — the lyrical. " Australia," once remarked 

 a somewhat supercilious literary visitor, '' may have had a poet or 

 two " — and we have reason to know that he referred specially to one 

 of these two — " but she has no songs." The antipodean curse of 

 Australia's scentless flowers and songless birds extends, it seems, 

 according to this authority, to her bards. They may be brilliant of colour 

 as the flaming waratah or the flashing parroquet, but, like them too, 

 they have sweetness neither of scent nor sound, for they cannot sing. 

 Whatever truth there maybe in this as regards Charles Harpur, whose 

 somewhat unkempt muse, it must be confessed, had often more depth 

 of meaning in her than music, it is certainly the stupidest of literary 

 libels in the case of Henry Kendall, who as poet was emphatically 

 sweet singer or nothing. Nor can it be said that the graciously accorded 

 possible " poet or two " is much a reproach to a young country, the 

 story of whose short life is surely marvellous enough without adding 

 the discovery of a rich mine of poetic wealth to its other wonders. On 

 the contrary, we are not sure whether, under all the circumstances, the 

 allowance is not even liberal. How many great poets does even the 

 old country, with its long bead-roll of '^mighty poets gone before" 

 produce in a century ? and Australia is little more than a century old. 

 America is the nearest case in point, though, of course, with a A'astly 

 larger field for poetic growths ; yet with sweet singers and poets 

 innumerable, of great poets, poets of the first rank, America has pro- 

 duced not one. Here, with little or no past to inspire, save such a 

 past as all poetry and all prose might willingly let die ; with a rough 

 and ready present — not without its poetical side indeed, but as 

 against its practical prosaic opposite, a very small side — with only for 

 "Pierian spring," the mystery of a half-known, long-silent land, the 

 wild beauty of a yet semi-savage Nature, or such glimpses of a better 

 day as only the strongest poetic vision may catch through the haze, 

 often the thick fog, of much sordid surrounding, the wonder surely is, 

 less that Australia should have had only a " poet or two," than that 

 she should have had a poet at all. However, she has had much more 

 than that. Australian poets have much multiplied in the land since 

 the two we have named first discovered, like the old explorers her 



