Page:Facts and Fancies about Our "Son of the Woods", Henry Clarence Kendall and his Poetry (IA factsfanciesabou00hami).pdf/47

Rh of the poet had "woven into verse" even the very sunshine of our favoured clime, and had attuned even the very leaves lying on a waterpool, or the pebbles embedded in the streams, to the undying music of the poet's verse. The general public of Australia have only, during the last ten years or so, awakened to the full realisation of the fact that our scenery, of its kind, is unrivalled in its beauty and its charm of novelty, which beauty and novelty the poet Kendall first illustrated, with the poet's pen, nearly fifty years ago. To use his own words, as applied by him to Charles Harpur: "The air is full of the sounds that have passed into his poetry. The hushed voice of far torrents, the low thunder of heavy, remote waves, the seaward travelling song of high mountain winds, the dialogue of leaf and bird, and the inarticulate melodies of running waters are all here." Yet how few, comparatively speaking, know anything of Kendall or his poetry; nor has there been any appreciable effort to present it in attractive form to the youthful population to inspire a genuine and ennobling sentiment of love of home and country, which is at the root of all true patriotism. But to return to the words of George Elliot, from which we have made so long a diversion. George Elliot writes: "It is with men, as with trees; if you lop off their finest branches into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over by some rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been a grand tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial or erring life which we visit with our harsh blame may be but the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered." Fortunately for Australia, the young poet's "best limb," as a poet, was not withered; however, at times, it may have been benumbed for a season, and to what "heights sublime" he might have risen had he lived longer (for he died when scarcely forty years of age or thereabout), we cannot tell. "Songs from the Mountains," his last publication during his life, was written and prepared for