A Lost Opportunity

One dark, dark night--it was long ago,
The air was heavy and still and warm -
It fell to me and a man I know,
To see two girls to their father's farm.

There was little seeing, that I recall:
We seemed to grope in a cave profound.
They might have come by a painful fall,
Had we not helped them over the ground.

The girls were sisters. Both were fair,
But mine was the fairer (so I say).
The dark soon severed us, pair from pair,
And not long after we lost our way.

We wandered over the country-side,


A Hymn for Morning

See the star that leads the day
Rising shoots a golden ray,
To make the shades of darkness go
From heaven above and earth below;
And warn us early with the sight
To leave the beds of silent night,
From a heart sincere and sound
From its very deepest ground,
Send devotion up on high
Wing'd with heat to reach the sky.
See the time for sleep has run,
Rise before, or with the sun,
Lift thine hands and humbly pray
The fountain of eternal day,
That as the light serenely fair


A Grammarian's Funeral Shortly after the Revival of Learnin

Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture


A Code of Morals

Now Jones had left his new-wed bride to keep his house in order,
And hied away to the Hurrum Hills above the Afghan border,
To sit on a rock with a heliograph; but ere he left he taught
His wife the working of the Code that sets the miles at naught.

And Love had made him very sage, as Nature made her fair;
So Cupid and Apollo linked , per heliograph, the pair.
At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise --
At e'en, the dying sunset bore her busband's homilies.


A Farewel To Worldly Joys

Farewel ye Unsubstantial Joyes,
Ye Gilded Nothings, Gaudy Toyes,
Too long ye have my Soul misled,
Too long with Aiery Diet fed:
But now my Heart ye shall no more
Deceive, as you have heretofore:
For when I hear such Sirens sing,
Like Ithaca's fore-warned King,
With prudent Resolution I
Will so my Will and Fancy tye,
That stronger to the Mast not he,
Than I to Reason bound will be:
And though your Witchcrafts strike my Ear,
Unhurt, like him, your Charms I'll hear.


A Disqualified Jockey's Story

You see, the thing was this way -- there was me,
That rode Panopply, the Splendor mare,
And Ikey Chambers on the Iron Dook,
And Smith, the half-caste rider on Regret,
And that long bloke from Wagga -- him that rode
Veronikew, the Snowy River horse.
Well, none of them had chances -- not a chance
Among the lot, unless the rest fell dead
Or wasn't trying -- for a blind man's dog
Could see Enchantress was a certain cop,
And all the books was layin' six to four.
They brought her out to show our lot the road,


A December Day

Blue, blue is the sea to-day,
Warmly the light
Sleeps on St. Andrews Bay --
Blue, fringed with white.

That's no December sky!
Surely 'tis June
Holds now her state on high,
Queen of the noon.

Only the tree-tops bare
Crowning the hill,
Clear-cut in perfect air,
Warn us that still

Winter, the aged chief,
Mighty in power,
Exiles the tender leaf,
Exiles the flower.

Is there a heart to-day,
A heart that grieves
For flowers that fade away,


A Christmas Carol

Welcome, sweet Christmas, blest be the morn
That Christ our Saviour was born!
Earth's Redeemer, to save us from all danger,
And, as the Holy Record tells, born in a manger.

Chorus --

Then ring, ring, Christmas bells,
Till your sweet music o'er the kingdom swells,
To warn the people to respect the morn
That Christ their Saviour was born.

The snow was on the ground when Christ was born,
And the Virgin Mary His mother felt very forlorn
As she lay in a horse's stall at a roadside inn,


A Change of Menu

Now the new chum loaded his three-nought-three,
It's a small-bore gun, but his hopes were big.
"I am fed to the teeth with old ewe," said he,
"And I might be able to shoot a pig."
And he trusted more to his nose than ear
To give him warning when pigs were near.

Out of his lair in the lignum dark.
Where the wild duck nests and the bilbie digs,
With a whoof and a snort and a kind of bark
There rose the father of all the pigs:
And a tiger would have walked wide of him


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