We are
sorry that a scholar and a man of culture like Sir Edwin Arnold should
have been guilty of what is really an act of treason against our
literature. But for this error, his book, though not in any sense a work
of genius or even of high artistic merit, would still have been of some
enduring value. As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa'di and some
one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.

With Sa'di in the Garden; or The Book of Love. By Sir Edwin Arnold,
M.A., K.C.I.E., Author of The Light of Asia, etc. (Trubner and Co.)

AUSTRALIAN POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 14, 1888.)

Mr. Sladen dedicates his anthology (or, perhaps, we should say his
herbarium) of Australian song to Mr. Edmund Gosse, 'whose exquisite
critical faculty is,' he tells us, 'as conspicuous in his poems as in his
lectures on poetry.' After so graceful a compliment Mr. Gosse must
certainly deliver a series of discourses upon Antipodean art before the
Cambridge undergraduates, who will, no doubt, be very much interested on
hearing about Gordon, Kendall and Domett, to say nothing of the
extraordinary collection of mediocrities whom Mr. Sladen has somewhat
ruthlessly dragged from their modest and well-merited obscurity. Gordon,
however, is very badly represented in Mr. Sladen's book, the only three
specimens of his work that are included being an unrevised fragment, his
Valedictory Poem and An Exile's Farewell. The latter is, of course,
touching, but then the commonplace always touches, and it is a great pity
that Mr. Sladen was unable to come to any financial arrangement with the
holders of Gordon's copyright. The loss to the volume that now lies
before us is quite irreparable. Through Gordon Australia found her first
fine utterance in song.

Still, there are some other singers here well worth studying, and it is
interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree,
gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves,
and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless
raptures of the mopoke. To them November is

The wonder with the golden wings,
Who lays one hand in Summer's, one in Spring's:

January is full of 'breaths of myrrh, and subtle hints of rose-lands';

She is the warm, live month of lustre--she
Makes glad the land and lulls the strong sad sea;

while February is 'the true Demeter,' and

With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,
Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands.

Each month, as it passes, calls for new praise and for music different
from our own. July is a 'lady, born in wind and rain'; in August

Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;

while October is 'the queen of all the year,' the 'lady of the yellow
hair,' who strays 'with blossom-trammelled feet' across the
'haughty-featured hills,' and brings the Spring with her. We must
certainly try to accustom ourselves to the mopoke and the sarsaparilla
plant, and to make the gum-tree and the buddawong as dear to us as the
olives and the narcissi of white Colonus.