Works

Oh, tell me, ye breezes that spring from the west,
Oh, tell me, ere passing away,
If Leichhardt's bold spirit has fled to its rest?
Where moulders the traveller's clay?
...

A grace that was lent for a very few hours,
By the bountiful Spirit above us;
She sleeps like a flower in the land of the flowers,
She went ere she knew how to love us....

Where the strength of dry thunder splits hill-rocks asunder,
And the shouts of the desert-wind break,
By the gullies of deepness and ridges of steepness,
Lo, the cattle track twists like a snake!...

Every happy expression in these stanzas may fairly be claimed by the Hon. W. B. Dalley (Author's note)


Deep under the spires of a hill, by the feet of the thunder-cloud trod,...

I dread that street its haggard face
I have not seen for eight long years;
A mother's curse is on the place,
(There's blood, my reader, in her tears).
No child of man shall ever track,...

As when the strong stream of a wintering sea
Rolls round our coast, with bodeful breaks of storm,
And swift salt rain, and bitter wind that saith
Wild things and woeful of the White South Land...

The strong sob of the chafing stream
That seaward fights its way
Down crags of glitter, dells of gleam,
Is in the hills to-day.

But far and faint, a grey-winged form...

Twelve years ago our Jack was lost. All night,
Twelve years ago, the Spirit of the Storm
Sobbed round our camp. A wind of northern hills
That hold a cold companionship with clouds...

I see, as one in dreaming,
A broad, bright, quiet sea;
Beyond it lies a haven
The only home for me.
Some men grow strong with trouble,
But all my strength is past,
And tired and full of sorrow,...

The spirit of beautiful faces,
The light on the forehead of Love,
And the spell of past visited places,
And the songs and the sweetness thereof;
These, touched by a hand that is hoary;...

I am writing this song at the close
Of a beautiful day of the spring
In a dell where the daffodil grows
By a grove of the glimmering wing;
From glades where a musical word
Comes ever from luminous fall,...

He has a name which can't be brought
Within the sphere of metre;
But, as he's Peter by report,
I'll trot him out as Peter.

I call him mine; but don't suppose
That I'm his dad, O reader!...

I

I purposed once to take my pen and write,
Not songs, like some, tormented and awry
With passion, but a cunning harmony
Of words and music caught from glen and height,...

Gaul whose keel in far, dim ages ploughed wan widths of polar sea
Gray old sailor of Massilia, who hath woven wreath for thee?
Who amongst the world's high singers ever breathed the tale sublime...

Sometimes we feel so spent for want of rest,
We have no thought beyond. I know to-day,
When tired of bitter lips and dull delay
With faithless words, I cast mine eyes upon...

Said one who led the spears of swarthy Gad,
To Jesse's mighty son: 'My Lord, O King,
I, halting hard by Gibeon's bleak-blown hill
Three nightfalls past, saw dark-eyed Rizpah, clad...

High travelling winds by royal hill
Their awful anthem sing,
And songs exalted flow and fill
The caverns of the spring.

To-night across a wild wet plain
A shadow sobs and strays;...

Sweet water-moons, blown into lights
Of flying gold on pool and creek,
And many sounds and many sights
Of younger days are back this week.
I cannot say I sought to face
Or greatly cared to cross again...

No classic warrior tempts my pen
To fill with verse these pages
No lordly-hearted man of men
My Muse's thought engages.

Let others choose the mighty dead,
And sing their battles over!...

Strong pinions bore Safi, the dreamer,
Through the dazzle and whirl of a race,
And the earth, raying up in confusion,
Like a sea thundered under his face!

And the earth, raying up in confusion,...