Still, it was as one who has deliberately observed a country and adapted himself to its life and needs that Gordon wrote. There were no pre-natal and unrealized impressions at work before the birth of his Southern muse; it was all conscious and intentional. On the other hand, Henry Kendall was innately Australian—the first, and as yet the greatest, of her true poets. He was saturated with the spirit of the place long before he ever wrote a word, before his childish fingers could hold the pen; perhaps, even, before he ever saw the light of day. He read English poets with avidity, and yet he judged them by his own involuntary standards—the standard of one for whom Nature wears a completely different face from that which she shows to those whose childhood has been spent among English meadows and woods. And because he was so true to himself and his country, and because his art was so simple and so sincere—and he wrote from his very heart and soul—if for no other reasons, Kendall’s writings can never fail to be dear to the best of his countrymen; deserving, indeed, to be far more dear than they have yet become. The verses on the death of his little baby-girl, Araluen, might have been trivial, even mawkish, if it were not that their heartbroken words ring with such truth in our ears that we cannot fail to know that the poet is not writing about what he saw or heard, but what he felt, wrung to the soul, as he already was at the time that those lines were written, by poverty, by shame, and sorrow. Nowadays the Australian poet has but little excuse for melancholy, though he still seems to be “saddest when he sings,” unless he happens to be affecting a Kipling-like jargon. That is why his sentiments do not ring so true as they might do—as true as in the days when his life in the New Country was so bitterly hard and barren, and when such horrors as that murder of the colonists by blacks—which led Kendall to write “On the Paroo”—could stir a poet’s soul to a finer frenzy than any merely personal suffering. “The wild men came upon them like a fire Of desert thunder; and the fierce, firm lips That touched a mother’s lips a year before, And hands that knew a dearer hand than life, Were hewn like sacrifice before the stars, And left with hooting owls and blowing clouds, And falling leaves and solitary wigs. . . . . . . . “Turn thyself and sing; Sing, son of sorrow. Is there any gain For breaking of the loins, for melting eyes, And knees as weak as water?—Any balm For pleading women, and the love that knows Of nothing left to love?” Compare this, which is very typical of Kendall, with the following, as completely typical of Gordon: