Page:Facts and Fancies about Our "Son of the Woods", Henry Clarence Kendall and his Poetry (IA factsfanciesabou00hami).pdf/40

34 Poor Kendall! what did he know of disappointed ambition at his then time of life, being little more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, or thereabout. Had he some mysterious foreboding of what was awaiting him in his future life? Of the thorny path he would have to travel, and the neglect and the scant sympathy he would have to endure? Did he foresee "The lot austere ever pressing, with its hardship on the man of letters here?"

In the stanzas on "Coogee"—our Coogee that every Sydneyite or visitor to Sydney knows so well—there is still the same strain of sadness, though written in early manhood, probably when residing in Sydney, which he did for some years after publishing his first book entitled "Poems and Songs," Sir John Robertson, then Premier of New South Wales, having given him a position as clerk in the Chief Secretary's office, or some Civil Service clerkship, which position he occupied when he married Miss Charlotte Rutter, the daughter of Doctor Rutter, then of Woolloomooloo, at that time one of the fairly fashionable suburbs of Sydney, though now quite out of date as "a choice suburb for private residence," Mr. and Mrs. Kendall's first meeting was at the Sydney School of Arts, where, after a lecture on "Love, Courtship and Marriage" by the poet (which old-fashioned subjects we don't trouble ourselves about now, for lectures), Mr. Rutter was introduced to his sister, in whom the poet became at once so warmly interested that is own courtship began and continued with such ardour that he and Miss Charlotte Rutter were married the following year, and in the first year of their marriage resided in one of our suburbs of Sydney called the Glebe. Whether he wrote "Coogee" before or after his marriage I do not know, but it was published in any volume until "Leaves from the Forests" was presented to the public in Melbourne (some few years after his marriage), where he and Mrs. Kendall were then residing. But he was always