Chapter II: (The Time-Spirit speaks.)

"Poor lads! And you for others' wrongs and sins
Whose dead past greed and lust did never wince
To make your fathers, mothers, and now you
Miserable fiends in hell, must expiate, since

"We the more guilty, we the strong, the few,
Whose triumph thrusts you down into the stew,
Fear lest our victims rise and rend us, fear
This problem mad we will not listen to!

"Victims, with her your fellow-victim here,
Blind, deaf, dumb beasts, the hour shall yet appear
When men, when justicers resolute-terrible, you
Shall speak and all men tremble as they hear!"

"TYRANNY." (_Melbourne_.)

[_The Delegates speak_.]

"'Tyranny'? Yes, that's it!
We are not afraid
To face the word that's fit
For what we've said!

"It's the tyranny of the Many,
That will not allow
There's the right to any
To seek wealth and power now

"At the expense of the Many.
Say, that one or this
Works 'over hours': then he
Drives us all to the abyss,

"Where, struggling together
One rises again
While the rest all together
Are stifled and slain.

"From this death-strife of brothers
Comes the tyranny of One.
That's _your_ sort. But we others,
_We prefer our own_!"

FROM A VERANDAH. (_Sydney_.) "_Armageddon_."

O city lapped in sun and Sabbath rest,
With happy face of plenteous ease possessed,
Have you no doubts that whisper, dreams that moan
Disquietude, to stir your slumbering breast?

Think you the sins of other climes are gone?
The harlot's curse rings in your streets--the groan
Of out-worn men, the stabbed and plundered slaves
Of ever-growing Greed, these are your own!

O'er you shall sweep the fiery hell that craves
For quenchment the bright blood of human waves:
For you, if you repent not, shall atone
For Greed's dark death-holes with War's swarming graves!

"ELSIE:" A MEMORY.

Little elfin maid,
Old, though scarce two years,
With your big dark hazel eyes
Tenderer than tears,

And your rosebud mouth
Lisping jocund things,
Breaking brooding silence with
Wistful questionings!

Like a flower you grew
While life's bright sun shone.
Does the greedy spendthrift earth
Heed a flower is gone?

No; but Love's fond ken,
That gropes through Death's strange ways,
Almost seems to hear your Voice,
Seems to see your Face!

"NATIONALISM AND M'ILWRAITH!" THE QUEENSLAND ELECTIONS CRY, 1888.

Australia listened! Through the brawling game
Of played-out rascals gambling for her gold,
The rotten-hearted traitors who had sold
For flimsy English gauds her righteous fame--
Through the foul hubbub, it did seem, there came
The still small voice of nobler things untold.
But now, but now with wonder manifold
She hears a voice that calls her by her name!

Australia listens, as the mother wilt
To hear her first-born cry. "Say, is it death,
Or life and all life's hope made audible
That thrills my heart and gives my spirit faith?"
From out the gathering war-hosts leaps forth shrill
The double cry, "_Australia_, _M'Ilwraith_!"

The dawn is breaking northward! Rise, O Sun,
Australian Liberty, and give us light!
And thou who through the dark and doubtful night
With great clear eyes of patience looking on
Even to that splendid hour REPUBLICAN,
O know what things are with thee in the fight--
What hope and trust, what truth, what right, what might
To never leave this work till it be done!
Not as these others were, the helpless slaves
Of each diurnal need and cringing debt,
Australia's statesman, have we known thee yet!--
The world's great heroes call from a thousand graves:
"_Thy land_, _a nation_, _cries to thee to be set_
_Free as the freedom of her ocean waves_!"

TO THE EMPEROR WILLIAM.

LONDON, May 15, 1889.--"The promised interview with the Emperor
William was granted to-day to the delegates from the coal-miners now
on strike in Westphalia; but the audience lasted for only ten
minutes. The men asked that the Emperor would inquire into the
merits of their case and the hardships under which they suffered.
His Majesty replied that he was already inquiring into the matter.
He then warned the miners that he would employ all his great powers
to repress socialistic agitation and intrigue. If the slightest
resistance was shown he would shoot every man so offending. On the
other hand, he promised to protect them if peaceable."--_Cablegram_.

Son of a Man and grandson of a Man,
Mannikin most miserable in thy shrunken shape
And peevish, shrivelled-soul, is't _thou_ wouldst ape
The thunder-bearer of Fate's blustering clan?
Know, then, that never, since the years began,
The terrible truth was surer of this word:
"_Who takes the sword_, _shall perish by the sword_!"
For mankind's nod makes mannikin and man.

Surely it was not shed too long ago,
That Emperor's blood that stained the Northern snow,
O thou King Stork aspiring that art King Log,
Wild-boar that wouldst be, reeking there all hog;
To teach thy brutish brainlessness to know
Those who pulled down a lion can shoot a dog.

A STORY. (_For the Irish Delegates in Australia_.)

Do you want to hear a story
With a nobler praise than "glory,"
Of a man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like
hell?
Then, that story let me tell you
Once again, though it as well you
Know as I--the splendid story of the man they call Parnell!

By the wayside of the nations,
Lashed with whips and execrations,
Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying, she, the Maiden Nation, lay;
And the burthen of dishonour
Weighed so grievously upon her
That her very children hid their eyes and crept in shame away.

And there as she was lying
Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying,
All her high-born foes came round her, fleering, jeering, as they
said:
"What is freedom fought and won for?
She is dead! She's down and done for!"
And her weeping children shuddered as they crouched and whispered:
"Dead!"

Then suddenly up-starting,
All that throng before him parting,
See, a man with firm step breaking through that central knot that
gives;
And, as by some dear lost sister,
He knelt down, and softly kissed her,
And he raised his pale, proud face, and cried: "She is not dead. She
lives!

"O she lives, I say, and I here,
I am come to fight and die here
For the love my heart has for her like a slow consuming fire;
For the love of her low lying,
For the hatred deep, undying
Of the robber lords who struck and stabbed and trod her in the mire!"

Then upon that cry bewildering,
Some of them, her hapless children--
In their hearts there leaped up hope like light when night gives birth
to day;
And, as mocks and threats defied him,
One by one they came beside him,
Till they stood, a band of heroes, sombre, desperate, at bay!

And the battle that they fought there,
And the bitter truth they taught there
To the blinded Sister-Nation suffering grievously alway,
All the wrong and rapine past hers,
Of her lords and her task masters,
Is not this the larger hope of all as night gives birth to day!

For the lords and liars are quaking
At the People's stern awaking
From their slumber of the ages; and the Peoples slowly rise,
And with hands locked tight together,
One in heart and soul for ever,
Watch the sun of Light and Liberty leap up into the skies!

That's the story, that's the story
With a nobler praise than "glory,"
Of the Man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like
hell,
And with calm, proud exultation
Bade her stand at last a nation,
Ireland, Ireland that is one name with the name of Charles Parnell!

AT THE INDIA DOCKS. A MEMORY OF AUGUST, 1883.

[The spectacle of the life of the London Dock labourers is one of the most terrible examples of the logical outcome of the present social system. In the six great metropolitan docks over 100,000 men are employed, the great bulk of whom are married and have families. By the elaborate system of sub-contracts their wages have been driven down to 4d., 3d., and even 2d. for the few hours they are employed, making the average weekly earnings of a man amount to 7, 6, and even 5 shillings a week! Hundreds and hundreds of lives are lost or ruined every year by the perilous nature of the work, and absolutely without compensation. Yet so fierce is the competition that men are not unfrequently maimed or even killed in the desperate struggles at the gates for the tickets of employment, guaranteeing a "pay" which often does not amount to more than a few pence! The streets and houses inhabited by this unfortunate class are of the lowest kind--haunts of vice, disease, and death, and the monopolistic companies are thus directly able to profit by their wholesale demoralization by ruthlessly crushing out, through the contractors, all efforts at organisation on the part of the men. To see these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine, British Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers, and sailors the first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes by what means the colossal work of loading and unloading them is carried out; this is to face a sacrificial orgy of human life--childhood, youth, manhood, womanhood, and age, with everything that makes them beautiful and ennobling, and not merely a misery and a curse--far more appalling than any Juggernaut progress or the human holocausts that were offered up to Moloch.]

I stood in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth
and Woe;
And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with desperate
grief,
And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no relief.
For never a moment--no; not one--through all the dreary day,
And thro' all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stay
Of the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,
As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me mad.

And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless,
stood,
And the river's exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,
Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent
drain
That carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain--
There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city's light,
A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,
Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shape
Of that thundering great Machinery from which there was no escape.

It stood there high in the heavens, fronting the face of God,
And the spray it sprinkled had blasted the green and flowery sod
All round where, through stony precincts, its Cyclopean pillars fell
To its adamantine foundations that were fixed in the womb of hell.
And the birds that, wild and whirling, and moth-like, flew to its
glare
Were struck by the flying wheel-spokes, and maimed and murdered there;
And the dust that swept about its black panoply overhead,
And the din of it seemed to shatter and scatter the sheeted dead.

But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den,
And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men,
Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see,
From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came
perpetually--
Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing,
some crying,
Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead
and the dying
Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.

Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain,
And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain--
How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood,
And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood.
And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit,
And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth of it
In the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel's devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.

And once again as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on,
I saw the shape of the Idol like a king turned carrion,
Yet crowned and more terrific thus for his human fleshly loss,
And with one clenched hand he brandished a lash, and the other held up
a cross!
And all around the Altar were seated, joyous and free,
In garments richly-coloured and choice, a goodly company,
Eating and drinking and wantoning, like gods that scorned to know
Of the thundering great Machinery and the crowds and the Pit below.

Ah, Christ! the sights and the sounds there that every hour befell
Would wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell,
But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease--
Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease;
Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;
Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in
the mire;
Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been,
Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine!

And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight,
At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of
might,
When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise,
Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies.
But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say,
For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day.
But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel,
The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence fell.

Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an eye--
A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry:
"Enough, enough! It has had enough! We will march no more till we
drop
In the furnace Pit. Give us food! Give us rest! Though the accursed
Machinery stop!"
And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their
feet,
And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet.
And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod.
And "Stop the Machinery!" he yelled, "you might as well stop God!"

But the terrible thunder-cry replied: "If this indeed must be,
It is YOU should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine--not
WE!"
And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight,
And all the aerial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of might,
And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overhead
The great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge,
blood-red!
But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see or
know,
Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth
and Woe!

DIRGE. (_Brisbane_.) "_A little Soldier of the Army of the Night_."

Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring's breath.

Nature slays ten, yet the one
Reaches but to a part
Of what's to be done, to be sung.
Keep we a proud heart!

Let us not glose her waste
With lies and dreams;
Fawn on her wanton haste,
Say it but seems.

Comrades, with faces unstirred,
Scorning grief's dole,
Though with him, with him lies interred
Our heart and soul,

Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring's breath.

TO QUEEN VICTORIA IN ENGLAND. AN ADDRESS ON HER JUBILEE YEAR.

Madam, you have done well! Let others with praise unholy,
Speech addressed to a woman who never breathed upon earth,
Daub you over with lies or deafen your ears with folly,
I will praise you alone for your actual imminent worth.
Madam, you have done well! Fifty years unforgotten
Pass since we saw you first, a maiden simple and pure.
Now when every robber landlord, capitalist rotten,
Hated oppressors, praise you--Madam, we are quite sure!

Never once as a foe, open foe, to the popular power,
As nobler kings and queens, have you faced us, fearless and bold:
No, but in backstairs fashion, in the stealthy twilight hour,
You have struggled and struck and stabbed, you have bartered and
bought and sold!
Melbourne, the listless liar, the gentleman blood-beslavered,
Disraeli, the faithless priest of a cynical faith out-worn,
These were dear to your heart, these were the men you favoured.
Those whom the People loved were fooled and flouted and torn!

Never in one true cause, for your people's sake and the light's sake,
Did you strike one honest blow, did you speak one noble word:
No, but you took your place, for the sake of wrong and the night's
sake,
Ever with blear-eyed wealth, with the greasy respectable herd.
Not as some robber king, with a resolute minister slave to you, {110}
Did you swagger with force against us to satisfy your greed:
No, but you hoarded and hid what your loyal people gave to you,
Golden sweat of their toil, to keep you a queen indeed!

Pure at least was your bed? pure was your Court?--We know not.
Were the white sepulchres pure? Gather men thorns of grapes?
Your sons and your blameless spouse's, certes, as Galahads show not.
Round you gather a crowd of bloated hypocrite shapes!
Never, sure, did one woman produce in such sixes and dozens
Such intellectual _canaille_ as this that springs from you;
Sons, daughters, grandchildren, with uncles, aunts, and cousins,
Not a man or a woman among them--a wretched crew!

Madam, you have done well! You have fed all these to repletion--
You have put a gilded calf beside a gilded cow,
And bidden men and women behold the forms of human completion--
Albert the Good, Victoria the Virtuous, for ever--and now!
But what to you were our bravest and best, man of science and poet,
Struggling for Light and Truth, or the Women who would be free?
Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Arnold? We know it--
Tennyson slavers your hand; Argyll fawns at your knee!

Good, you were good, we say. You had no wit to be evil.
Your purity shines serene over Floras mangled and dead.
You wasted not our substance in splendour, in riot or revel--
You quietly sat in the shade and grew fat on our wealth instead.
Madam, you have done well! To you, we say, has been given
A wit past the wit of women, a supercomputable worth.
Of you we can say, if not "of such are the Kingdom of Heaven,"
Of such (alas for us!), of such are the Kingdom of Earth!

FAREWELL TO THE CHILDREN.

In the early summer morning
I stand and watch them come,
The children to the school-house;
They chatter and laugh and hum.

The little boys with satchels
Slung round them, and the girls
Each with hers swinging in her hand;
I love their sunny curls.

I love to see them playing,
Romping and shouting with glee,
The boys and girls together,
Simple, fearless, free.

I love to see them marching
In squads, in file, in line,
Advancing and retreating,
Tramping, keeping time.

Sometimes a little lad
With a bright brave face I'll see,
And a wistful yearning wonder
Comes stealing over me.

For once I too had a darling;
I dreamed what he should do,
And surely he'd have had, I thought,
Just such a face as you.

And I, I dreamed to see him
Noble and brave and strong,
Loving the light, the lovely,
Hating the dark, the wrong,--

Loving the poor, the People,
Ready to smile and give
Blood and brain to their service,
For them to die or live!

No matter, O little darlings!
Little boys, you shall be
My citizens for faithful labour,
My soldiers for victory!

Little girls, I charge you
Be noble sweethearts, wives,
Mothers--comrades the sweetest,
Fountains of happy lives!

Farewell, O little darlings!
Far away,--with strangers, too--
He sleeps, the little darling,
I dreamed to see like you.

And I, O little darlings,
I have many miles to go,
And where I too may stop and sleep,
And when, I do not know.

But I charge you to remember
The love, the trust I had,
That you'd be noble, fearless, free,
And make your country glad!

That you should toil together,
Face whatever yet shall be,
My citizens for faithful labour,
My soldiers for victory!

I charge you to remember;
I bless you with my hand,
And I know the hour is coming
When you shall understand:

When you shall understand too,
Why, as I said farewell,
Although my lips were smiling,
The shining tears down fell.

EPODE. "_On the Ranges_, _Queensland_."

Beyond the night, down o'er the labouring East,
I see light's harbinger of dawn released:
Upon the false gleam of the ante-dawn,
Lo, the fair heaven of day-pursuing morn!

Beyond the lampless sleep and perishing death
That hold my heart, I feel my new life's breath,
I see the face my spirit-shape shall have
When this frail clay and dust have fled the grave.

_Beyond the night_, _the death of doubt_, _defeat_,
_Rise dawn and morn_, _and life with light doth meet_,
_For the great Cause_, _too_,--_sure as the sun yon ray_
_Shoots up to strike the threatening clouds and say_;
"_I come_, _and with me comes the victorious Day_!"

* * * * *

When I was young, the muse I worshipped took me,
Fearless, a lonely heart, to look on men.
"'Tis yours," said she, "to paint this show of them
Even as they are!" Then smiling she forsook me.

Wherefore with passionate patience I withdrew,
With eyes from which all loves, hates, hopes, and fears,
Joys aureole, and the blinding sheen of tears,
Were purged away. And what I saw I drew.

Then, as I worked remote, serene, alone,
A child-girl came to me and touched my cheek,
And lo her lips were pale, her limbs were weak,
Her eyes had thirst's desire and hunger's moan.

She said: "I am the soul of this sad day
Where thousands toil and suffer hideous Crime,
Where units rob and mock the empty time
With revel and rank prayer and deaths display!"

I said: "O child, how shall I leave my songs,
My songs and tales, the warp and subtle woof
Of this great work and web, in your behoof
To strive and passionately sing of wrongs?

"Child, is it nothing that I here fulfil
My heart and soul? that I may look and see
Where Homer bends and Shakspere smiles on me,
And Goethe praises the unswerving will?"

She hung her head, and straight, without a word,
Passed from me. And I raised my conscious face
To where, in beauteous power in her place,
She stood, the muse, my muse, and watched and heard.

Her proud and marble brow was faintly flushed;
Upon her flawless lips, and in her eyes
A mild light flickered as the young sunrise,
Glad, sacred, terrible, serene and hushed.

Then I cried out, and rose with pure wrath wild,
Desperate with hatred of Fate's slavery
And this cold cruel demon. With that cry,
I left her, and sought out the piteous child.

"_Darling_, _'tis nothing that I shed and weep_
_These tears of fire that wither all the heart_,
_These bloody sweats that drain and sear and smart_,
_I love you_, _and you'll kiss me when I sleep_!"

* * * * *

THE END.

* * * * *

AUSTRALIAN PRESS NOTICES.

"This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power,
inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse
that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of
course, excepting the complete 'Poetical Works' of the same author).
_That_ is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of
passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The
uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the
misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,

This putrid death,
This flesh-feast of the few,
This social structure of red mud,
This edifice of slime,
Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood,
Whose pinnacle is crime!

Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the
quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks,
but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell 'of our own
manufacture,' whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old
village by the Thames--(trade mark, 'Commerce and Christ.')"--SYDNEY
JEPHCOTT, "_Australian Standard_."

AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

"Francis Adams is about the least Australian of the Australian poets.
There is in his work lack of wattle-bloom and waratah, rollicking
rhyme and galloping jingle. There is much of old-world problems and
old-world troubles, which are old-world simply because we here have
not had time enough to breed the fever germ to a ravaging pestilence.
We have, however, the fever germ, and Francis Adams does our young
country yeoman service in awakening a fear for the future in his
latest book of poems, 'Songs of the Army of the Night.' The book is
not all night though. It is a cantata without music. The first part
is all gloom; angry threatening clouds bar out the light of the coming
dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen plash along in the mud and
darkness; the lightning of angry steel, gleaming phosphorescent in the
night; the hoarse hum of famished millions moiling along with a dim
yearning for a bloody vengeance, contribute the details of a grim
picture of realistic misery. The first part deserves the title given
to the whole book, 'Songs of the Army of the Night.' The third part
is perturbed and stormy, the sea heaving and surging after a tempest;
but already the day is breaking, and young hope is felt in the warmth
of the sun's first rays. The third part might be justly termed 'Songs
of the Dawn.' The second part is hot and heavy with the languorous
heat of the tropics. . . . The whole book is a hymn in praise of
fodder. The people march hungry, hoarse with lack of sustenance,
gripping their firelocks with feverish, skeleton hands, glaring
fiercely with famished eyes towards the granaries of the wealthy. . .
. This is the sermon of Nature: 'If you would be good, eat.' It is
in the first part that we hear the trumpet-blast of the social
message. Here the verses throb with a realistic agony, a lyric
Zolaism, that chains the eyes to the page with a virile fascination.
It is so simple, too--the coarse, strong meat of the poetry of first
principles. The lines are hot and fervid; the poet's pulses keep time
with the great heart of human woe. This is socialism in verse,
anarchism in the guise of a Grecian statue. 'Outside London' breathes
thick and heavy with the vapours of gutterdom. It is despair, hunger,
prophecy, hate, revenge. Francis Adams, a ripe and true scholar, in
this shows his devotion to truth and to art. The traditions of
classicism are in this volume thrown to the winds. The poet's muse is
a glorified street trull, a Cassandra of the slums, a draggle-tailed
Menad from Whitechapel, and her voice is thick and frenzied with
shouting at the barricades. 'The Evening Hymn in the Hovels,'
'Hagar,' 'To the Girls of the Unions,' 'In the Edgware Road,' 'In
Trafalgar Square,' 'Aux Ternes,' 'One among so many,' 'The New
Locksley Hall,' 'To the Christians,' voice in passionate, simple
people's lyrics the socialism which is always felt in strong
under-currents by a nation before it appears in literary form, but
which is only on the eve of bursting forth and overwhelming everything
with its fury, when it does appear in literary form. Rosseau,
Voltaire, and Diderot ushered in the French Revolution; in similar
fashion the English Revolution is heralded by William Morris and
Francis Adams."--F. J. BROOMFIELD, Sydney _Bulletin_.

"DAWNWARDS?"

_To the Author of the_ "_Songs of the Army of the Night_."

We--who, encircled in sleepless sadness
With ears laid close to the Austral earth,
Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness,
Of hopeless anguish and murd'rous mirth
Beneath all noise of maudlin gladness
Awail, environ the world's wide girth--

Almost arise with Hope's keen urging
When out the vasty and night-bound North
Red rays ascend, and Songs resurging
Through all the darkness and chill, come forth!

The comet climbs until it scorches
The sacred dais that skies the great,
Until it gleams on palace porches,
Where blissful aeons-to-be hold state--
Fades, and we know it one of the torches
Madmen a moment elevate!

And, closer clutching the earth, our sorrow
Doth then with desperate murmur cry,
"We ne'er shall see or morn or morrow!
For never star doth scale the sky,

"All men made wise through midnight sable
To lead where, safe after all annoy,
Sleep soft in earth's Augean stable
The virgin "_Justice_," the infant "_Joy_!"--
Grant this, O Father, being able,
Or else in merciful might destroy

"This orb whose past and present, awful
Alike, attest it a torture wheel,
Where, bound by holy men and lawful,
Man's body's broken with bars of steel!"

But when we pause, despairing wholly,
As a storm that strengthens out on the sea,
The far-flown SONGS come sounding slowly!
As sea-birds kindle that sweep alee
New hopes, old yearnings winging slowly
From breast to bosom for shelter flee!

And scarce we know, as there they hover
And our blood beats 'neath their beating wings,
If 'tis an old dream earthed over
Or new bird-ballad that stirs and sings!

But truth's Tyrtaeus is now our neighbour,
And strives to waken the slumbering South
With peal and throb of trump and tabour
And sobbing songs of his mournful mouth
To see where Life's all-giver, Labour,
Lies fettered, famished and dumb with drouth.

SYDNEY JEPHCOTT,
Brisbane _Boomerang_, 25th January 1888.

NOTES.

{27} In _The New Arcadia_ Miss Robinson devoted to the Cause of Labour a dilettante little book that had not even one note of the true, the sweet and lovely poetry of her deeper impulses. There is the amateur, and the female amateur, no less in perception and emotion than in the technical aspects of our art, and we want no more flimsy "sympathetic" rigmaroles, like "The Cry of the Children," or "A Song for the Ragged Schools of London," from those who, in the portraiture of the divine simple woman's soul within them, can give us poetry complete, genuine, everlasting.

{32} His attack on George Eliot in "Fiction, Fair and Foul," in the _Nineteenth Century_, for instance.

{33} The attack on Missionary Ridge is an example of the brilliant initiative, as the holding of the Bloody Angle in the Wilderness is of the dauntless resolution, of the army of the Democracy of the United States, while the last attacks on Richmond were the final exploit of the conqueror of two combatants, of whom it is enough to say that they were worthy of one another.

{35} Something like an adequate account of this great _revolution manquee_, which in England and 1381 went near to anticipating France and 1793, has at last found its place in the historian's pages, and Longland the poet, Ball the preacher, and Tyler the man of action, who first raised for us the democratic demand, can be seen somewhat as they were. This, and more, we owe to John Richard Green. An account of the Revolt will be found in section 4 of chapter 5 of his "Short History of the English People." The phrases in verses 3 and 5 were catchwords among the revolters.

{36} After dismissing the peasants with the formally written acknowledgment of their freedom and rights, Richard II. with an army of 40,000 followers avenged himself and his lords by ruthless and prolonged massacres over the whole country.

{38} Who owns, and rack-rents, some of the vilest slums in London, and is beautifully aesthetic in private life.

{39a} The French.

{39b} "Voe victis!" woe to the conquered--the motto of the Gauls in Rome as of the modern Civilization of Land and Capital.

{44} France.

{45} In Pere-la-Chaise, the famous Parisian cemetery, the Communists made a desperate stand, but were overcome and the captured ones shot. And Morny's vaulted tomb was close at hand, and Balzac smiled his animal cynicism from his bust. Victims, murderer, and commenting Chorus, all were there.

{46} A part of Paris.

{49} The New Model is the name by which is known that reorganization of the Roundhead Army, without which Cromwell saw that the Cavaliers could not be conquered. No one was permitted in its ranks who did not thoroughly believe in the Cause for which it fought.

{66} This graveyard, one side of a gully, which suddenly expands and leaves its base large enough for the local race-course, is in summer one of the loveliest spots on earth. Hindoos, Protestants, Catholics, and Mahommadan have their separate portions. Here in regimental or individual tombs are the record of noble lives thrown away in the iniquity of the English relations with China.

{69a} The Russian tea-urn.

{69b} In China the system of Trades Unions is admirable.--Coolie is the generic term in the East for labourer.

{70} This is one of the three well-known colossi of Gautama, the Buddha. The same type of proud patience marks this embodiment of the suffering East, wherever we meet it.

{76} Dr Moorhouse came out to Melbourne as bishop in the Church of England there in 1876. He almost immediately took the position of the leading religious personality in Australia. To a rare geniality he added the gifts of a "scholar" and a "gentleman," both real and both as modern as yet seems permitted to the old caste and religion. He achieved an influence over men of all denominations, and of none, that was quite phenomenal, and might have been used for a national object as great as good. The work of his diocese, however, proving too much for his strength, he announced the fact, and declared that, unless his bishopric were divided, he would be compelled to resign it. Shortly afterwards he accepted the bishopric of Manchester, on the ground that "a larger sphere of labour had been offered to him unsolicited." His departure was a sort of national event.

{79a} Orang-utan.

{79b} The Buddhistic temple in Java, known as the temple of Borobodo.

{80} This explanation of these curious arborial growths is Mr Alfred Wallace's (_Malay Archipelago_, chapter v.), and in this matter also we may perhaps be content to rely on that "innate genius for solving difficulties" which Darwin has assigned to the illustrious naturalist whom Socialism is proud to number among her sons.

{84} The Australian Seamen's Union, after defeating our most powerful shipping company over the question of Coloured Labour, after compelling the companies that used Coloured Labour to abandon all coastal trade, in alliance with the Miners, faces the craft that was once the brutality of the sea-capitalists with the same dauntless determination, the same noble self-restraint, that made it long ago the protagonist of Australian Labour.

{87a} His attack on Carlyle, for instance, of which the prose part is the fouler, the verse part the more virulent.

{87b} Poems and Ballads. (1st Series.)

{87c} Songs before Sunrise.

{87d} The picturesque Italian gentlemen who struggled so heroically for Italian Nationalism represent to-day a tyranny deeper and more dark than that of the Austrian foreigners, the tyranny of _caste_. The certainty of popularity was the bait held out by the greasy respectability of the _London Times_, and poetical vanity swallowed it, making Mr Swinburne also among the panders in his denunciation of Irish Nationalism.

{89} To Mr Zox is chiefly due the formation of the Union of Female Workers, Servants, and Shop-girls in Melbourne. There is no class called upon to endure more petty tyranny and injustice, more hard work and insult, and there is no class which finds less real sympathy and help. Cannot stupid Sydney follow suit?

{95} This was one of the most horrible crimes of our time. A band of young ruffians assaulted, violated, and frightfully maltreated a young girl of rather dubious character. Nine were arraigned, seven condemned to death, and four hanged. The trial was most indecently hurried by a Judge who seemed determined to make the affair, from the aspect of law and justice, as evilly noteworthy as from other aspects of it.

{110} Charles I. and Stafford, _e.g._