Valleys and hills, with the whisper of wing in them,
Dells of the daffodil--spaces impearled,
Flowered and flashed with the splendour of spring in them,
Back in the morn of this wonderful world.

Mr. Sladen speaks of Alfred Domett as 'the author of one of the great
poems of a century in which Shelley and Keats, Byron and Scott,
Wordsworth and Tennyson have all flourished,' but the extracts he gives
from Ranolf and Amohia hardly substantiate this claim, although the song
of the Tree-God in the fourth book is clever but exasperating.

A Midsummer's Noon, by Charles Harpur, 'the grey forefather of Australian
poetry,' is pretty and graceful, and Thomas Henry's Wood-Notes and Miss
Veel's Saturday Night are worth reading; but, on the whole, the
Australian poets are extremely dull and prosaic. There seem to be no
sirens in the New World. As for Mr. Sladen himself, he has done his work
very conscientiously. Indeed, in one instance he almost re-writes an
entire poem in consequence of the manuscript having reached him in a
mutilated condition.

A pleasant land is the land of dreams
_At the back of the shining air_!
It hath _sunnier_ skies and _sheenier_ streams,
And gardens _than Earth's more_ fair,

is the first verse of this lucubration, and Mr. Sladen informs us with
justifiable pride that the parts printed in italics are from his own pen!
This is certainly editing with a vengeance, and we cannot help saying
that it reflects more credit on Mr. Sladen's good nature than on his
critical or his poetical powers. The appearance, also, in a volume of
'poems produced in Australia,' of selections from Horne's Orion cannot be
defended, especially as we are given no specimen of the poetry Horne
wrote during the time that he actually was in Australia, where he held
the office of 'Warden of the Blue Mountains'--a position which, as far as
the title goes, is the loveliest ever given to any poet, and would have
suited Wordsworth admirably: Wordsworth, that is to say, at his best, for
he not infrequently wrote like the Distributor of Stamps. However, Mr.
Sladen has shown great energy in the compilation of this bulky volume
which, though it does not contain much that is of any artistic value, has
a certain historical interest, especially for those who care to study the
conditions of intellectual life in the colonies of a great empire. The
biographical notices of the enormous crowd of verse-makers which is
included in this volume are chiefly from the pen of Mr. Patchett Martin.
Some of them are not very satisfactory. 'Formerly of West Australia, now
residing at Boston, U.S. Has published several volumes of poetry,' is a
ludicrously inadequate account of such a man as John Boyle O'Reilly,
while in 'poet, essayist, critic, and journalist, one of the most
prominent figures in literary London,' few will recognise the industrious
Mr. William Sharp.

Still, on the whole, we should be grateful for a volume that has given us
specimens of Kendall's work, and perhaps Mr. Sladen will some day produce
an anthology of Australian poetry, not a herbarium of Australian verse.
His present book has many good qualities, but it is almost unreadable.