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.