There then they fell to feasting, hallowing in the high-tide of their return with victory in their hands:  and the dead corpses of Thiodolf and Otter, clad in precious glittering raiment, looked down on them from the High-seat, and the kindreds worshipped them and were glad; and they drank the Cup to them before any others, were they Gods or men.

In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high pleasure to welcome work of this kind.  It is a work in which all lovers of literature cannot fail to delight.

A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark.  Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris. (Reeves and Turner.)

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

(Pall Mall Gazette, March 25, 1889.)

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.