Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/163

 Who lived a life of wonder: flying round

And round the glen—what time the kangaroo

Leapt from his lair and huddled with the bats—

Far scattering down the wildly startled fells.

Then came the doleful owl; and evermore

The bleak morass gave out the bittern's call,

The plover's cry, and many a fitful wail

Of chilly omen, falling on the ear

Like those cold flaws of wind that come and go

An hour before the break of day.

Anon

The stranger held from toil, and, settling down,

He drew rough solace from his well-filled pipe,

And smoked into the night, revolving there

The primal questions of a squatter's life;

For in the flats, a short day's journey past

His present camp, his station yards were kept,

With many a lodge and paddock jutting forth

Across the heart of unnamed prairie-lands,

Now loud with bleating and the cattle bells,

And misty with the hut-fire's daily smoke.

Wide spreading flats, and western spurs of hills

That dipped to plains of dim perpetual blue;

Bold summits set against the thunder heaps;

And slopes behacked and crushed by battling kine,

Where now the furious tumult of their feet

Gives back the dust, and up from glen and brake

Evokes fierce clamour, and becomes indeed

A token of the squatter's daring life,

Which, growing inland—growing year by year—

Doth set us thinking in these latter days,

And makes one ponder of the lonely lands

Beyond the lonely tracks of Burke and Wills,

Where, when the wandering Stuart fixed his camps

In central wastes, afar from any home

Or haunt of man, and in the changeless midst

Of sullen deserts and the footless miles

Of sultry silence, all the ways about

Grew strangely vocal, and a marvellous noise

Became the wonder of the waxing glooms.