Down in the South, by the waste without sail on it-- Far from the zone of the blossom and tree-- Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it, Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea. Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it; Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey; Phantom of light is the light on the face of it-- Never is night on it, never is day! Here is the shore without flower or bird on it; Here is no litany sweet of the springs-- Only the haughty, harsh thunder is heard on it, Only the storm, with a roar in its wings! Back in the dawn of this beautiful sphere, on it-- Land of the dolorous, desolate face-- Beamed the blue day; and the beautiful year on it Fostered the leaf and the blossom of grace. Grand were the lights of its midsummer noon on it-- Mornings of majesty shone on its seas; Glitter of star and the glory of 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,