'There were but two, and we were forty! Yet,' The Captain wrote, 'that dauntless couple throve, And faced our wildering faces; and I said 'Lie to awhile!' I did not choose to let...
Where is the painter who shall paint for you, My Austral brothers, with a pencil steeped In hues of Truth, the weather-smitten crew Who gazed on unknown shores a thoughtful few...
'Tis holy ground! The silent silver lights And darks undreamed of, falling year by year Upon his sleep, in soft Australian nights, Are joys enough for him who lieth here...
She knelt by the dead, in her passionate grief, Beneath a weird forest of Tanna; She kissed the stern brow of her father and chief, And cursed the dark race of Alkanna....
She sleeps and I see through a shadowy haze, Where the hopes of the past and the dreams that I cherished In the sunlight of brighter and happier days, As the mists of the morning, have faded and perished....
Wizened the wood is, and wan is the way through it; White as a corpse is the face of the fen; Only blue adders abide in and stray through it Adders and venom and horrors to men....
Set your face toward the darkness tell of deserts weird and wide, Where unshaken woods are huddled, and low, languid waters glide; Turn and tell of deserts lonely, lying pathless, deep and vast,...
A sky of wind! And while these fitful gusts Are beating round the windows in the cold, With sullen sobs of rain, behold I shape A settler's story of the wild old times:...
The verdant ivy clings around Yon moss be-mantled wall, As if it sought to hide the stones, That crumbling soon must fall: That relic of a bygone age Now tottering to decay,...
He crouches, and buries his face on his knees, And hides in the dark of his hair; For he cannot look up to the storm-smitten trees, Or think of the loneliness there Of the loss and the loneliness there....
Rolling through the gloomy gorges, comes the roaring southern blast, With a sound of torrents flying, like a routed army, past, And, beneath the shaggy forelands, strange fantastic forms of surf...
Where the pines with the eagles are nestled in rifts, And the torrent leaps down to the surges, I have followed her, clambering over the clifts, By the chasms and moon-haunted verges....
It passed like the breath of the night-wind away, It fled like a mist at the dawn of the day; It lasted its moment, then backward was hurled, Another increase to the age of the world. ...
Hear ye not the waters beating where the rapid rivers, meeting With the winds above them fleeting, hurry to the distant seas, And a smothered sound of singing from old Ocean upwards springing,...
Low as a lute, my love, beneath the call Of storm, I hear a melancholy wind; The memorably mournful wind of yore Which is the very brother of the one That wanders, like a hermit, by the mound...
Who framed the stanza of Childe Harold? He It was who, halting on a stormy shore, Knew well the lofty voice which evermore, In grand distress, doth haunt the sleepless sea...
Ill fares it with the man whose lips are set To bitter themes and words that spite the gods; For, seeing how the son of Saturn sways With eyes and ears for all, this one shall halt...
Where the lone creek, chafing nightly in the cold and sad moonshine, Beats beneath the twisted fern-roots and the drenched and dripping vine; Where the gum trees, ringed and ragged, from the mazy margins rise,...
The cool grass blowing in a breeze Of April valleys sooms and sways; On slopes that dip to quiet seas Through far, faint drifts of yellowing haze. I lie like one who, in a dream...