Page:Facts and Fancies about Our "Son of the Woods", Henry Clarence Kendall and his Poetry (IA factsfanciesabou00hami).pdf/30

24 He brought to homeless homes A soft sweet light. Garnered from sea-foam crest, Sharp and bright.

He died.The natives Did, to mark its loss, Some sign arise, It did—a wooden cross.

Whereon go grit your teeth, Who fame would win— There, hangs a nation's wreath Of painted tin."

I do not know who wrote these lines, and am sorry for that, as he certainly deserves our thanks. If I remember rightly, I read these lines in the course of my Kendall lecture, and they had the desired effect; for when these lines were sent to me, just before my lecture on Henry Kendall and his poetry at the Sydney School of Arts, under the patronage of the School of Arts Committee (Mr. P.J. Holdsworth, as chairman), there had been really no practically energetic measures taken by the public for the erection of a suitable monument to his memory; or if any such measures had been started immediately after his death, they had been, comparatively, dropped. But the ball was, so to speak, again "sent rolling" with a set purpose of some public recognition of the Sydney citizens' gratitude and esteem for his works as a poet, with the result of a suitable monument being erected over his last earthly resting-place in the cemetery of Waverly, "by the sounding sea," where he had, I understood, desired to be buried. With the copy of the lines from the Syndey "Bulletin," and from the same source were sent me the serves of the In Memoriam piece on Marcus Clark, the author of the Australian story, "For the Term of His Natural Life," and many other brilliant writings appearing mostly in the columns of the Melbourne and Victorian Press and various magazines. The verses were written too late for publication in the volume entitled "Songs from the Mountains," which was