A critic recently remarked of Adam Lindsay Gordon that through him
Australia had found her first fine utterance in song. {452} This,
however, is an amiable error. There is very little of Australia in
Gordon's poetry. His heart and mind and fancy were always preoccupied
with memories and dreams of England and such culture as England gave him.
He owed nothing to the land of his adoption. Had he stayed at home he
would have done much better work. In a few poems such as The Sick
Stockrider, From the Wreck, and Wolf and Hound there are notes of
Australian influences, and these Swinburnian stanzas from the dedication
to the Bush Ballads deserve to be quoted, though the promise they hold
out was never fulfilled:

They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.

Whence gather'd?--The locust's grand chirrup
May furnish a stave;
The ring of a rowel and stirrup,
The wash of a wave.
The chaunt of the marsh frog in rushes,
That chimes through the pauses and hushes
Of nightfall, the torrent that gushes,
The tempests that rave.

In the gathering of night gloom o'erhead, in
The still silent change,
All fire-flushed when forest trees redden
On slopes of the range.
When the gnarl'd, knotted trunks Eucalyptian
Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian,
With curious device--quaint inscription,
And hieroglyph strange;

In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
'Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air draught resembles
A long draught of wine;
When the sky-line's blue burnish'd resistance
Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
Some song in all hearts hath existence,--
Such songs have been mine.

As a rule, however, Gordon is distinctly English, and the landscapes he
describes are always the landscapes of our own country. He writes about
mediaeval lords and ladies in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde, about Cavaliers
and Roundheads in The Romance of Britomarte, and Ashtaroth, his longest
and most ambitious poem, deals with the adventures of the Norman barons
and Danish knights of ancient days. Steeped in Swinburne and bewildered
with Browning, he set himself to reproduce the marvellous melody of the
one and the dramatic vigour and harsh strength of the other. From the
Wreck is a sort of Australian edition of the Ride to Ghent. These are
the first three stanzas of one of the so-called Bush Ballads:

On skies still and starlit
White lustres take hold,
And grey flashes scarlet,
And red flashes gold.
And sun-glories cover
The rose, shed above her,
Like lover and lover
They flame and unfold.

. . . . .

Still bloom in the garden
Green grass-plot, fresh lawn,
Though pasture lands harden
And drought fissures yawn.