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Rh account of the difficulties which we had met and overcome in conquering his natural timidity.

I must now return to the subject of the bush, from which the dolghite and his subterrene tastes have led me. The colour of the leaves in the Australian forest is of a browner and more sombre-looking green than is seen in the foliage of our deciduous trees at home, and this circumstance, combined with that of the trees being evergreens, causes most English persons to pine once a year for that freshness of spring-time to which they were accustomed in their own land, and to regret that in the southern hemisphere it is represented only by the first shooting of the cornfields and the early leaves of a few fruit trees foreign to the soil. I cannot say, however, that I ever felt any blank of this kind for which the abundance of the flowers did not, to my mind, make ample compensation. Nevertheless, so much poetical thought has been inspired by the four seasons, that I have sometimes wondered whether a country possessing only half as many could ever prove prolific in poets. From this want of change in the face of nature, this constant sameness of the foliage of the trees, the young people of Australia are at a disadvantage when compared with those of England; since much which is written by the poets and illustrated by the painters of the old country can touch no answering chord in their remembrances of the world around them; while nature, as she has appeared to their own eyes, has as yet found neither painter nor poet to interpret her.

Tennyson's description of a copse bursting into bud, or a picture of Copley Fielding's representing a landscape under a haze, would neither of them carry its full meaning