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