Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:

Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:

Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:

'Tis a dull sight
To see the year dying,
When winter winds
Set the yellow wood sighing:
Sighing, oh! sighing.

When such a time cometh,
I do retire
Into and old room
Beside a bright fire:
Oh, pile a bright fire!

And there I sit
Reading old things,
Of knights and lorn damsels,
While the wind sings—
Oh, drearily sings!

I never look out
Nor attend to the blast;
For all to be seen
Is the leaves falling fast:
Falling, falling!

But close at the hearth,
Like a cricket, sit I,

Not only on cross and gibbet,
By sword, and fire, and flood,
Have perished the world’s sad martyrs
Whose names are writ in blood.

A woman lay in a hovel,
Mean, dismal, gasping for breath;
One friend alone was beside her—
The name of him was—Death.

For the sake of her orphan children,
For money to buy them food,
She had slaved in the dismal hovel
And wasted her womanhood.

Winter and Spring and Summer
Came each with a load of cares;
And Autumn to her brought only
A harvest of gray hairs.

The Maple with its tassell flowers of green
That turns to red, a stag horn shapèd seed
Just spreading out its scallopped leaves is seen,
Of yellowish hue yet beautifully green.
Bark ribb'd like corderoy in seamy screed
That farther up the stem is smoother seen,
Where the white hemlock with white umbel flowers
Up each spread stoven to the branches towers
And mossy round the stoven spread dark green
And blotched leaved orchis and the blue-bell flowers -
Thickly they grow and neath the leaves are seen.

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,

It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town,
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down.
He loitered here he loitered there, till he was like to drop,
Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop.
'Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark,
I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark.'
The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are,
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash he smoked a huge cigar;
He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee,

He's the man from Eldorado, and he's just arrived in town,
In moccasins and oily buckskin shirt.
He's gaunt as any Indian, and pretty nigh as brown;
He's greasy, and he smells of sweat and dirt.
He sports a crop of whiskers that would shame a healthy hog;
Hard work has racked his joints and stooped his back;
He slops along the sidewalk followed by his yellow dog,
But he's got a bunch of gold-dust in his sack.

He seems a little wistful as he blinks at all the lights,
And maybe he is thinking of his claim

I SUPPOSE it just depends on where you’re raised,
Once I met a cove as swore by green belar!
Couldn’t sight the good old mallee-stump I praised;
Well!—I couldn’t sight belar, and there you are!
But the faces in the fire where the mallee stump’s a-blinking
Are the friendliest I ever seen, to my way o’ thinking!

In the city where the fires is mostly coal—
There! I can’t a-bear to go and warm my feet!
Spitting, fizzing things as hasn’t got no soul!
Things as puffs out yaller smoke instead of heat!

Good-morning, sun, 'mid the leaves so green --
Mind of youth in the dales' deep reaches,
Smile that brightens their somber speeches,
Heaven's gold on our earth-dust seen!

Good-morning, sun, o'er the royal tower!
Kindly thou beckonest forth each maiden;
Kindle each heart as a star light-laden,
Twinkling so clear, though a sad night lower!

Good-morning, sun, o'er the mountain-side!
Light the land that still sleep disguises
Till it awakens and fresh arises
For yonder day in thy warmth's full tide!

The clouds fast gather,
The forest-oaks roar--
A maiden is sitting
Beside the green shore,--
The billows are breaking with might, with might,
And she sighs aloud in the darkling night,
Her eyelid heavy with weeping.

"My heart's dead within me,
The world is a void;
To the wish it gives nothing,
Each hope is destroyed.
I have tasted the fulness of bliss below
I have lived, I have loved,--Thy child, oh take now,