The Earth Laments for Day

   There's music wafting on the air,
    The evening winds are sighing
   Among the trees—and yonder stream
    Is mournfully replying,
   Lamenting loud the sunny light
    That in the west is dying.

   The moon is rising o'er the hill,
    Her slanting rays are creeping
   Where Nature lies profoundly still
    In happy quiet sleeping,
   And resting on her face, they'll find
    The earth is wet with weeping.

   She mourneth for the lovely day,
    Now deep in darkness shaded;
   She sheds the dewy tear because
    Of morning's mantle faded;
   She misses from her breast the garb
    In which the moon array'd it.

   The evening queen will strive in vain
    To break the spell which bound her;
   A million stars can never throw
    Departed warmth around her;
   They all must pass away and leave
    The earth as they had found her.

   But why should gentle Nature weep
    That night has overtaken
   The wearied world that needed sleep,
    Refreshed to re-awaken,
   So richer light might burst around,
    The gloomy shadows breaking?

   Oh, can she not from yonder sky
    That gleams above her, borrow
   A single ray, or find a way
    To check the tear of sorrow?
   A beam of hope would last her till
    The dawning of to-morrow.

The Late W. V. Wild, Esq.

   Sad faces came round, and I dreamily said
    "Though the harp of my country now slumbers,
   Some hand will pass o'er it, in love for the dead,
    And attune it to sorrowful numbers!"
   But the hopes that I clung to are withering things,
   For the days have gone by with a cloud on their wings,
   And the touch of a bard is unknown to the strings—
    Oh, why art thou silent, Australia?

   The leaves of the autumn are scattering fast,
    The willows look barren and lonely;
   But I dream a sad dream of my friend of the past,
    And his form I can dwell upon only!
   In the strength of his youth I can see him go by.
   There is health on the cheek, and a fire in the eye—
   Oh, who would have thought that such beauty could die!
    Ah, mourn for thy noblest, Australia!

   A strange shadow broods o'er the desolate earth,
    And the cypresses tremble and quiver;
   But my heart waxeth dark with the thoughts of the worth
    That has left us for ever and ever!
   A dull cloud creepeth close to the moon,
   And the winter winds pass with a shuddering croon—
   Oh, why was he snatched from his brothers so soon?
    Ah, weep for thy lost one, Australia!

   How weary we grow when we turn to reflect
    Upon what we have seen and believed in;
   When harping on promises hopelessly wrecked,
    And the things we have all been deceived in!
   When a voice that I loved lingers near to me yet!
   And a kind, handsome face which I'll never forget—
   Can I wake to the present and stifle regret—
    Can I smother these feelings, Australia?

   It is useless to grieve o'er the light that has fled
    But the harp of my country still slumbers;
   And I thought that some bard in his love for the dead,
    Would have thrilled it to sorrowful numbers!
   Lo, the hopes that I clung to are withering things
   For the days have gone by with a cloud on their wings,
   And my hand is too feeble to strike at the strings—
    Oh, why art thou silent, Australia?

Astarte

    Across the dripping ridges,
     O, look, luxurious night!
    She comes, the bright-haired beauty,
     My luminous delight!
     My luminous delight!
    So hush, ye shores, your roar,
   That my soul may sleep, forgetting
    Dead Love's wild Nevermore!

    Astarte, Syrian sister,
     Your face is wet with tears;
    I think you know the secret
     One heart hath held for years!
     One heart hath held for years!
    But hide your hapless love,
   And my sweet—my Syrian sister,
    Dead Love's wild Nevermore!

    Ah, Helen Hope in heaven,
     My queen of long ago,
    I've swooned with adoration,
     But could not tell you so,
     Or dared not tell you so,
    My radiant queen of yore!
   And you've passed away and left me
    Dead Love's wild Nevermore!

    Astarte knoweth, darling,
     Of eyes that once did weep,
    What time entranced Passion
     Hath kissed your lips in sleep;
     Hath kissed your lips in sleep;
    But now those tears are o'er,
   Gone, my saint, with many a moan to
    Dead Love's wild Nevermore!

    If I am past all crying,
     What thoughts are maddening me,
    Of you, my darling, dying
     Upon the lone, wide sea,
     Upon the lone, wide sea,
    Ah! hush, ye shores, your roar,
   That my soul may sleep, forgetting
    Dead Love's wild Nevermore!

Australian War Song

   Men have said that ye were sleeping—
    Hurl, Australians, back the lie;
   Whet the swords you have in keeping,
    Forward stand to do or die!
   Hear ye not, across the ocean,
    Echoes of the distant fray,
   Sounds of loud and fierce commotion,
    Swiftly sweeping on the way?
   Hearts have woke from sluggish trances,
    Woke to know their native worth;
   Freedom with her train advances—
    Freedom newly sprung to birth.
   Despots start from thrones affrighted—
    Tyrants hear the angry tread;
   Where the slaves, whose prayers were slighted,
    Marching—draw the sword instead.

   If the men of other nations
    Dash their fetters to the ground;
   When the foeman seeks your stations,
    Will you willing slaves be found?
   You the sons of hero fathers—
    Sires that bled at Waterloo!
   No!  Your indignation gathers—
    To your old traditions true;
   Should the cannon's iron rattle
    Sound between your harbour doors,
   You will rise to wage the battle
    In a just and righteous cause.
   Patriot fires will scorch Oppression
    Should it dare to draw too near;
   And the tide of bold Aggression
    Must be stayed from coming here.

   Look upon familiar places,
    Mountain, river, hill and glade;
   Look upon those beauteous faces,
    Turning up to you for aid.
   Think ye, in the time of danger,
    When that threatening moment comes—
   Will ye let the heartless stranger
    Drive your kindred from their homes?
   By the prayers which rise above you,
    When you face him on the shore,
   By the forms of those that love you—
    Greet him with the rifle's roar!
   While an arm can wield a sabre,
    While you yet can lift a hand,
   Strike and teach your hostile neighbour,
    This is Freedom's chosen land.

The Ivy on the Wall

   The verdant ivy clings around
    Yon moss be-mantled wall,
   As if it sought to hide the stones,
    That crumbling soon must fall:
   That relic of a bygone age
    Now tottering to decay,
   Has but one friend—the ivy—left.
    The rest have passed away.

   The fairy flowers that once did bloom
    And smile beneath its shade;
   They lingered till the autumn came,
    And autumn saw them fade:
   The emerald leaves that blushed between—
    The winds away have blown;
   But yet to cheer the mournful scene,
    The ivy liveth on.

   Thus heavenly hope will still survive,
    When earthly joys have fled;
   And all the flow'ry dreams of youth
    Lie withering and dead.
   When Winter comes—it twines itself
    Around the human heart;
   And like the ivy on the wall
    Will ne'er from thence depart.

The Australian Emigrant

   How dazzling the sunbeams awoke on the spray,
   When Australia first rose in the distance away,
   As welcome to us on the deck of the bark,
   As the dove to the vision of those in the ark!
   What fairylike fancies appear'd to the view
   As nearer and nearer the haven we drew!
   What castles were built and rebuilt in the brain,
   To totter and crumble to nothing again!

   We had roam'd o'er the ocean—had travers'd a path,
   Where the tempest surrounded and shriek'd in its wrath:
   Alike we had roll'd in the hurricane's breath,
   And slumber'd on waters as silent as death:
   We had watch'd the Day breaking each morn on the main,
   And had seen it sink down in the billows again;
   For week after week, till dishearten'd we thought
   An age would elapse ere we enter'd the port.

   How often while ploughing the 'watery waste',
   Our thoughts—from the Future have turn'd to the Past;
   How often our bosoms have heav'd with regret;
   For faces and scenes we could never forget:
   For we'd seen as the shadows o'er-curtain'd our minds
   The cliffs of old England receding behind;
   And had turned in our tears from the view of the shore,
   The land of our childhood, to see it no more.

   But when that red morning awoke from its sleep,
   To show us this land like a cloud on the deep;
   And when the warm sunbeams imparted their glow,
   To the heavens above and the ocean below;
   The hearts had been aching then revell'd with joy,
   And a pleasure was tasted exempt from alloy;
   The souls had been heavy grew happy and light
   And all was forgotten in present delight.

   'Tis true—of the hopes that were verdant that day
   There is more than the half of them withered away:
   'Tis true that emotions of temper'd regret,
   Still live for the country we'll never forget;
   But yet we are happy, since learning to love
   The scenes that surround us—the skies are above,
   We find ourselves bound, as it were by a spell,
   In the clime we've adopted contented to dwell.

To My Brother, Basil E. Kendall

   To-night the sea sends up a gulf-like sound,
   And ancient rhymes are ringing in my head,
   The many lilts of song we sang and said,
   My friend and brother, when we journeyed round
   Our haunts at Wollongong, that classic ground
   For me at least, a lingerer deeply read
   And steeped in beauty.  Oft in trance I tread
   Those shining shores, and hear your talk of Fame
   With thought-flushed face and heart so well assured
   (Beholding through the woodland's bright distress
   The Moon half pillaged of her loveliness)
   Of this wild dreamer:  Had you but endured
   A dubious dark, you might have won a name
   With brighter bays than I can ever claim.

The Waterfall

   The song of the water
    Doomed ever to roam,
   A beautiful exile,
    Afar from its home.

   The cliffs on the mountain,
    The grand and the gray,
   They took the bright creature
    And hurled it away!

   I heard the wild downfall,
    And knew it must spill
   A passionate heart out
    All over the hill.

   Oh! was it a daughter
    Of sorrow and sin,
   That they threw it so madly
    Down into the lynn?

       .   .   .

   And listen, my Sister,
    For this is the song
   The Waterfall taught me
    The ridges among:—

   "Oh where are the shadows
    So cool and so sweet
   And the rocks," saith the water,
    "With the moss on their feet?

   "Oh, where are my playmates
    The wind and the flowers—
   The golden and purple—
    Of honey-sweet bowers,

   "Mine eyes have been blinded
    Because of the sun;
   And moaning and moaning
    I listlessly run.

   "These hills are so flinty!—
    Ah! tell me, dark Earth,
   What valley leads back to
    The place of my birth?—

   "What valley leads up to
    The haunts where a child
   Of the caverns I sported,
    The free and the wild?

   "There lift me,"—it crieth,
    "I faint from the heat;
   With a sob for the shadows
    So cool and so sweet."

   Ye rocks, that look over
    With never a tear,
   I yearn for one half of
    The wasted love here!

   My sister so wistful,
    You know I believe,
   Like a child for the mountains
    This water doth grieve.

   Ah! you with the blue eyes
    And golden-brown hair,
   Come closer and closer
    And truly declare:—

   Supposing a darling
    Once happened to sin,
   In a passionate space,
    Would you carry her in—

   If your fathers and mothers,
    The grand and the gray,
   Had taken the weak one
    And hurled her away?

The Song of Arda

   (From "Annatanam".)

   Low as a lute, my love, beneath the call
   Of storm, I hear a melancholy wind;
   The memorably mournful wind of yore
   Which is the very brother of the one
   That wanders, like a hermit, by the mound
   Of Death, in lone Annatanam.  A song
   Was shaped for this, what time we heard outside
   The gentle falling of the faded leaf
   In quiet noons:  a song whose theme doth turn
   On gaps of Ruin and the gay-green clifts
   Beneath the summits haunted by the moon.
   Yea, much it travels to the dens of dole;
   And in the midst of this strange rhyme, my lords,
   Our Desolation like a phantom sits
   With wasted cheeks and eyes that cannot weep
   And fastened lips crampt up in marvellous pain.

   A song in whose voice is the voice of the foam
      And the rhyme of the wintering wave,
   And the tongue of the things that eternally roam
      In forest, in fell or in cave;
   But mostly 'tis like to the Wind without home
      In the glen of a desolate grave—
       Of a deep and desolate grave.

   The torrent flies over the thunder-struck clift
      With many and many a call;
   The leaves are swept down, and a dolorous drift
      Is hurried away with the fall.
   But mostly 'tis like the Wind without home
      In the glen of a desolate grave—
       Of a deep and desolate grave.

   Whoever goes thither by night or by day
      Must mutter, O Father, to Thee,
   For the shadows that startle, the sounds that waylay
      Are heavy to hear and to see;
   And a step and a moan and a whisper for aye
      Have made it a sorrow to be—
       A sorrow of sorrows to be.

   Oh! cover your faces and shudder, and turn
      And hide in the dark of your hair,
   Nor look to the Glen in the Mountains, to learn
      Of the mystery mouldering there;
   But rather sit low in the ashes and urn
      Dead hopes in your mighty despair—
       In the depths of your mighty despair.

The Helmsman

   Like one who meets a staggering blow,
    The stout old ship doth reel,
   And waters vast go seething past—
   But will it last, this fearful blast,
   On straining shroud and groaning mast,
    O sailor at the wheel?

   His face is smitten with the wind,
    His cheeks are chilled with rain;
   And you were right, his hair is white,
   But eyes are calm and heart is light
   He does not fear the strife to-night,
    He knows the roaring main.

   Ho, Sailor!  Will to-morrow bring
    The hours of pleasant rest?
   An answer low—"I do not know,
   The thunders grow and far winds blow,
   But storms may come and storms may go—
    Our God, He judgeth best!"

   Now you are right, brave mariner,
    But we are not like you;
   We, used to shore, our fates deplore,
   And fear the more when waters roar;
   So few amongst us look before,
   Or stop to think that Heaven is o'er—
    Ah! what you say is true.

   And those who go abroad in ships,
    Who seldom see the land,
   But sail and stray so far away,
   Should trust and pray, for are not they,
   When Darkness blinds them on their way,
    All guided by God's hand?

   But you are wrinkled, grey and worn;
    'Tis time you dwelt in peace!
   Your prime is past; we fail so fast;
   You may not last through every blast,
   And, oh, 'tis fearful to be cast
    Amongst the smothering seas!

   Is there no absent face to love
    That you must live alone?
   If faith did fade, if friends betrayed,
   And turned, and staid resolves you'd made,
   Ah, still 'tis pleasant to be laid
    Where you at least are known.

   The answer slides betwixt our words—
    "The season shines and glooms
   On ship and strand, on sea and land,
   But life must go and Time is spanned,
   As well you know when out you stand
    With Death amongst the tombs!

   "It matters not to one so old
    Who mourns when Fate comes round,
   And one may sleep down in the deep
    As well as those beneath the heap
   That fifty stormy years will sweep
    And trample to the ground."

   Your speech is wise, brave mariner,
    And we would let you be;
   You speak with truth, you strive to soothe;
   But, oh, the wrecks of Love and Truth,
   What say you to our tears for Youth
    And Beauty drowned at sea?

   "Oh, talk not of the Beauty lost,
    Since first these decks I trod
   The hopeless stare on faces fair,
   The streaming, bare, dishevelled hair,
   The wild despair, the sinking—where,
    Oh where, oh where?—My God!"

To Miss Annie Hopkins

   Beneath the shelter of the bush,
   In undisturbed repose—
   Unruffled by the kiss of breeze—
   There lurks a smiling rose;
   Beneath thine outer beauty, gleams,
   In holy light enshrined,
   A symbol of the blooming flower,
   A pure, unspotted mind.

   The lovely tint that crowns the hill
   When westward sinks the sun,
   The milder dazzle in the stream
   That evening sits upon,
   The morning blushes, mantling o'er
   The face of land and sea,
   They all recall to mind the charms
   That are combined in thee!

Foreshadowings

   Fifteen miles and then the harbour!  Here we cannot choose but stand,
   Faces thrust towards the day-break, listening for our native land!
   Close-reefed topsails shuddering over, straining down the groaning mast;
   For a tempest cleaves the darkness, hissing, howling, shrieking past!
   Lo! the air is flecked with stormbirds, and their melancholy wail
   Lends a tone of deeper pathos to the melancholy gale!
   Whilst away they wheel to leeward, leaving in their rapid flight
   Wind and water grappling wildly through the watches of the night.

   Yesterday we both were happy; but my soul is filled with change,
   And I'm sad, my gallant comrade, with foreshadowings vague and strange!
   Dear old place, are we so near you?  Like to one that speaks in sleep,
   I'm talking, thinking wildly o'er this moaning, maddened deep!
   Much it makes me marvel, brother, that such thoughts should linger nigh
   Now we know what shore is hidden somewhere in that misty sky!
   Oh! I even fear to see it; and I've never felt so low
   Since we turned our faces from it, seven weary years ago.

   Have you faith at all in omens?  Fits of passion I have known
   When it seemed in crowded towns as if I walked the Earth alone!
   And amongst my comrades often, o'er the lucent, laughing sea,
   I have felt like one that drifteth on a dark and dangerous lee!
   As a man who, crossing waters underneath a moony night,
   Knows there will be gloomy weather if a cloudrack bounds the light,
   So I hold, when Life is splendid, and our hopes are new and warm,
   We can sometimes, looking forward, see the shade and feel the storm.

   When you called me I was dreaming that this thunder raged no more,
   And we travelled, both together, on a calm, delightful shore;
   That we went along rejoicing, for I thought I heard you say,
   "Now we soon shall see them, brother—now our fears have passed away!"
   Pleasant were those deep green wild-woods; and we hurried, like a breeze,
   Till I saw a distant opening through the porches of the trees;
   And our village faintly gleaming past the forest and the stream;
   But we wandered sadly through it with the Spirit of my Dream.

   Why was our delight so fickle?  Was it well while there to mourn;
   When the loved—the loving, crowding, came to welcome our return?
   In my vision, once so glorious, did we find that aught was changed;
   Or that ONE whom WE remembered was forgotten or estranged?
   Through a mist of many voices, listening for sweet accents fled,
   Heard we hints of lost affection, or of gentle faces dead?
   No! but on the quiet dreamscape came a darkness like a pall
   And a ghostly shadow, brother, fell and rested over all.

   Talking thus my friend I fronted, and in trustful tones he spake—
   "I have long been waiting, watching here to see the morning break;
   Now behold the bright fulfilment!  Did my Spirit yearn in vain;
   And amidst this holy splendour can a moody heart remain?
   Let them pass, those wayward fancies!  Waking thoughts return with sleep;
   And they mingle strangely sometimes, while we lie in slumber deep;
   But, believe me, dreams are nothing.  If unto His creatures weak
   God should whisper of the Future, not in riddles will He speak."

   Since he answered I have rested, for his brave words fell like balm;
   And we reached the land in daylight, and the tempest died in calm;
   Though the sounds of gusty fragments of a faint and broken breeze
   Still went gliding with the runnels, gurgling down the spangled leas!
   So we turned and travelled onward, till we rested at a place
   Where a Vision fell about us, sunned with many a lovely face;
   Then we heard low silvery voices; and I knelt upon the shore—
   Knelt and whispered, "God I thank Thee! and will wander never more."