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AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE. bush. The poets sing of the "burning wastes of barren soil and sand," or, in another mood, of "the sunlit plains extended" and "the won- drous glory of the everlasting stars." The Australian singers of the Nineteenth Century number more than one hundred. The earliest was Barron Field. Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, who published at Sydney, in 1819, The First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Among succeeding verse-makers were W. C. Wentworth, author of Australasia; J. D. Lang, Sir Henry Parkes, Charles Harpur (1812-68), known as the Australian Wordsworth, and Lionel Michael, author of Songs Without Music (1857). A new period for Australian poetry began with Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Clarence Kendall. Gordon, born in the Azores, in 1833, educated at Oxford, emigrated to South Australia, in 1851, taking leave of England in lines imitated from Childe Harold. He became a horse-dealer, horse-trainer, and the best steeplechase rider in the Colonies. His life was particularly pathetic, and he died by his own hand, in 1870. Gordon published three volumes: Sea-Spray and Smoke-Drift (1867), Ashtaroth (1867), and Bush Ballads (1870). In his sporting poems and narratives, based on his own wild experiences, we first get at the heart of Australia. The horse and the rider he glorified in ballads that have the ring of Scott and Macaulay. The Byronic influence never left him. His despair reaches intense expression in Whither Bound? Kendall was born at Ulla- dulla, New South Wales, in 1842. There, in the lonely bush, he passed his boyhood. His life was saddened by an inherited love for drink, which he mastered only after years of struggle. He died near Sydney in 1882. His first volume. Songs and Poems (1862), was followed by Leaves from an Australian Forest, containing his best work, and Songs from the Mountains. Of less force than Gordon, Kendall, 'the national poet,' sang with great beauty of the Australian hills, streams, and forests, in poems like "September in Australia," "The Hut by the Black Swamp," and "A Death in the Bush." Among the many other poets belonging to the last part of the Nineteenth Century are A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, Edward Dyson, Alfred Domett, J. Brunton Stephens, Miss Jen- nings Carmichael (afterwards Mrs. Francis Mul- lis), Ada Cambridge (afterwards Mrs. G. F. Cross), Charles Allan Sherrard, Alexander Sutherland, E. B. Loughran. J. B. O'Hara, Wil- liam Gay, and George Gordon McCrae. All this verse compares favorably with what is now being produced by writers distinctively English or American.

Australia has offered fresh material to the novelist. Just as in poetry, the novel was at first imitative. Read the Australian novelists, and you feel the presence of Dickens. Charles Reade, Bret Harte, and Stevenson. Not until recently has Australia abandoned open imitation. Up to 1901, Australia had produced nearly three hundred novels and tales, without counting the many sketches that never got beyond the newspapers. The earliest, which appeared at Sydney from 1840 to 1850, are melodramatic, having as hero the escaped convict, or bushranger. In the next decade the convict and the picturesque cut-throat found a rival in the gold-digger, a much better hero. At this time some passable work in fiction was done by Miss C. H. Spence. afterwards known as a lecturer in England and America. Henry Kingsley (1830-76), brother of Charles Kingsley, went out to the gold-fields in 1853. At Langawilli, in West Victoria, he wrote Geoffry Hamlyn (published 1859), the best novel yet written dealing with Australia. Rolf Boldrewood (the pen-name of Thomas Alexander Browne) is, perhaps, the national novelist. Born in London in 1826, he was brought to Australia in 1830, and was educated at Sydney College. He formed a cattle-station in the wilderness, was for a long period police magistrate and gold-fields warden in New South Wales, and thus gathered material for a succession of faithful and stirring pictures of life as he had observed it. The grim struggle of the squatter is powerfully depicted in The Squatter's Dream (1890); outlawry, in Robbery Under Arms (1888); and the gold-digger, in The Miner's Right (1890). As in England and the United States, some very fine work has been done by women. Ada Cambridge (Mrs. G. F. Cross) is, perhaps, best known. At the age of twenty-six (1870) she went to Australia with her husband, and has lived there ever since, mostly in the bush districts of Victoria. In The Three Miss Kings (1891), she conceived the notion of depicting the life of three girls, brought up in a picturesque bush home, and their subsequent career. Mrs. Cross has also succeeded admirably with the problem-novel, as in A Marked Man (1890). Her other novels comprise My Guardian (1877), In Two Years' Time (1879), A Mere Chance (1882), Not All in Vain (1892), A Little Minx (1893), A Marriage Ceremony (1894), Fidelis (1895), A Humble Enterprise (1896), At Midnight (1897), and Materfamilias (1898). Mrs. Campbell Praed, born 1851, a native of Queensland, has published about twenty-five novels. In their stern and pessimistic outlook, they resemble the work of Hall Caine and Thomas Hardy. A typical novel is Longleat and Kooralbyn (1887). Other novels are Miss Jacobsen's Choice (1887), The Romance of a Station (1889), and As a Watch in the Night (1900). Madame Couvreur, better known by her pen-name, Tasma, passed many years in Victoria. She returned to England in 1879, and ten years later published Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill. She wrote two other good Australian stories — In Her Earliest Youth (1890), and Not Counting the Cost (1895). Hardly sure of her footing. Tasma dealt with the problems of education and heredity. Mary Gaunt (Mrs. Lindsay Miller) has cultivated chiefly the short story, in the way of sketches contributed to the Melbourne newspapers. A selection from these was published under the title The Moving Finger (1895). Of her longer novels, may be cited Dave's Sweetheart (1894). Guy Boothby gained wide popularity with The Beautiful White Devil (1896) and Dr. Nikola (1896), and has maintained it. Among the most read of the Australians is deservedly Louis Becke. He has written alone, and in collaboration with Walter Jeffery, a number of stirring adventures, first in the Stevenson and then in the Conrad style; such as By Reef and Palm (1896), Pacific Tales (1897), Wild Life in the Southern Seas (1897), and The Mutineer