Page:Facts and Fancies about Our "Son of the Woods", Henry Clarence Kendall and his Poetry (IA factsfanciesabou00hami).pdf/50

 lover of Nature will find his "pleasure in the pathless woods," and his "rapture in the lonely shore" doubly enhanced by the study of Kendall's poetry; and will discover new beauties both in the woods themselves and in the "songs" of our "Son of the Woods."

Of garden and cultivated flowers the heliotrope was one of his special favourites, and the ivy, or any plant that had a clinging tendency. But wild flowers, ferns, mosses, forest-leaves and trees were more dear to him than any cultivated plant, though it were the choicest and rarest exotic. He called himself "Son of the Woods," and it was certainly a most appropriate term applied to him both as a man and as a poet. His wife said of him that "he would have lived in a humpy, with the trees, if he had his way."

So our "Son of the Woods" writes of himself; and it is interesting to trace, in the characteristics of the every-day life of the man (when he was in his native element) some of the sources of the intellectual graces of the poet.

We of Australia needed just such a poet to weave the beauties of our country into verse, and yet one of the sorest complaints of certain critics against him as a poet was, that he did this—and most excellently, beyond anticipation—instead of using his poetic genius to portray "human feeling, passion, and sentiment," which it was not necessary to be born and bred in Australia to do, and would have been no use, actually, as literature to refer to for any patriotic purpose in far-future years. Henry Kendall was just the poet for Australia when Henry Kendall first presented his works to the Australian public; and had we been then more advanced as a nation, that fact would have been more generally recognised, as it will be, undoubtedly, in the future. His poetry should live in the minds of the Australian people,