moon on it
      Fell, in the march of the musical breeze. 
   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.