Dawnwards?

To the Author of the "Songs of the Army of the Night."

We--who, encircled in sleepless sadness With ears laid close to the Austral earth, Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness, Of hopeless anguish and murd'rous mirth Beneath all noise of maudlin gladness Awail, environ the world's wide girth--

Almost arise with Hope's keen urging When out the vasty and night-bound North Red rays ascend, and Songs resurging Through all the darkness and chill, come forth!

The comet climbs until it scorches The sacred dais that skies the great, Until it gleams on palace porches, Where blissful aeons-to-be hold state-- Fades, and we know it one of the torches Madmen a moment elevate!

And, closer clutching the earth, our sorrow Doth then with desperate murmur cry, "We ne'er shall see or morn or morrow! For never star doth scale the sky,

"All men made wise through midnight sable To lead where, safe after all annoy, Sleep soft in earth's Augean stable The virgin "Justice," the infant "Joy!"-- Grant this, O Father, being able, Or else in merciful might destroy

"This orb whose past and present, awful Alike, attest it a torture wheel, Where, bound by holy men and lawful, Man's body's broken with bars of steel!"

But when we pause, despairing wholly, As a storm that strengthens out on the sea, The far-flown SONGS come sounding slowly! As sea-birds kindle that sweep alee New hopes, old yearnings winging slowly From breast to bosom for shelter flee!

And scarce we know, as there they hover And our blood beats 'neath their beating wings, If 'tis an old dream earthed over Or new bird-ballad that stirs and sings!

But truth's Tyrtaeus is now our neighbour, And strives to waken the slumbering South With peal and throb of trump and tabour And sobbing songs of his mournful mouth To see where Life's all-giver, Labour, Lies fettered, famished and dumb with drouth.

SYDNEY JEPHCOTT, Brisbane Boomerang, 25th January 1888.

NOTES.

In The New Arcadia Miss Robinson devoted to the Cause of Labour a dilettante little book that had not even one note of the true, the sweet and lovely poetry of her deeper impulses. There is the amateur, and the female amateur, no less in perception and emotion than in the technical aspects of our art, and we want no more flimsy "sympathetic" rigmaroles, like "The Cry of the Children," or "A Song for the Ragged Schools of London," from those who, in the portraiture of the divine simple woman's soul within them, can give us poetry complete, genuine, everlasting.

His attack on George Eliot in "Fiction, Fair and Foul," in the Nineteenth Century, for instance.

The attack on Missionary Ridge is an example of the brilliant initiative, as the holding of the Bloody Angle in the Wilderness is of the dauntless resolution, of the army of the Democracy of the United States, while the last attacks on Richmond were the final exploit of the conqueror of two combatants, of whom it is enough to say that they were worthy of one another.

Something like an adequate account of this great revolution manquee, which in England and 1381 went near to anticipating France and 1793, has at last found its place in the historian's pages, and Longland the poet, Ball the preacher, and Tyler the man of action, who first raised for us the democratic demand, can be seen somewhat as they were. This, and more, we owe to John Richard Green. An account of the Revolt will be found in section 4 of chapter 5 of his "Short History of the English People." The phrases in verses 3 and 5 were catchwords among the revolters.

After dismissing the peasants with the formally written acknowledgment of their freedom and rights, Richard II. with an army of 40,000 followers avenged himself and his lords by ruthless and prolonged massacres over the whole country.

Who owns, and rack-rents, some of the vilest slums in London, and is beautifully aesthetic in private life.

{39a} The French.

{39b} "Voe victis!" woe to the conquered--the motto of the Gauls in Rome as of the modern Civilization of Land and Capital.

France.

In Pere-la-Chaise, the famous Parisian cemetery, the Communists made a desperate stand, but were overcome and the captured ones shot. And Morny's vaulted tomb was close at hand, and Balzac smiled his animal cynicism from his bust. Victims, murderer, and commenting Chorus, all were there.

A part of Paris.

The New Model is the name by which is known that reorganization of the Roundhead Army, without which Cromwell saw that the Cavaliers could not be conquered. No one was permitted in its ranks who did not thoroughly believe in the Cause for which it fought.

This graveyard, one side of a gully, which suddenly expands and leaves its base large enough for the local race-course, is in summer one of the loveliest spots on earth. Hindoos, Protestants, Catholics, and Mahommadan have their separate portions. Here in regimental or individual tombs are the record of noble lives thrown away in the iniquity of the English relations with China.

{69a} The Russian tea-urn.

{69b} In China the system of Trades Unions is admirable.--Coolie is the generic term in the East for labourer.

This is one of the three well-known colossi of Gautama, the Buddha. The same type of proud patience marks this embodiment of the suffering East, wherever we meet it.

Dr Moorhouse came out to Melbourne as bishop in the Church of England there in 1876. He almost immediately took the position of the leading religious personality in Australia. To a rare geniality he added the gifts of a "scholar" and a "gentleman," both real and both as modern as yet seems permitted to the old caste and religion. He achieved an influence over men of all denominations, and of none, that was quite phenomenal, and might have been used for a national object as great as good. The work of his diocese, however, proving too much for his strength, he announced the fact, and declared that, unless his bishopric were divided, he would be compelled to resign it. Shortly afterwards he accepted the bishopric of Manchester, on the ground that "a larger sphere of labour had been offered to him unsolicited." His departure was a sort of national event.

{79a} Orang-utan.

{79b} The Buddhistic temple in Java, known as the temple of Borobodo.

This explanation of these curious arborial growths is Mr Alfred Wallace's (Malay Archipelago, chapter v.), and in this matter also we may perhaps be content to rely on that "innate genius for solving difficulties" which Darwin has assigned to the illustrious naturalist whom Socialism is proud to number among her sons.

The Australian Seamen's Union, after defeating our most powerful shipping company over the question of Coloured Labour, after compelling the companies that used Coloured Labour to abandon all coastal trade, in alliance with the Miners, faces the craft that was once the brutality of the sea-capitalists with the same dauntless determination, the same noble self-restraint, that made it long ago the protagonist of Australian Labour.

{87a} His attack on Carlyle, for instance, of which the prose part is the fouler, the verse part the more virulent.

{87b} Poems and Ballads. (1st Series.)

{87c} Songs before Sunrise.

{87d} The picturesque Italian gentlemen who struggled so heroically for Italian Nationalism represent to-day a tyranny deeper and more dark than that of the Austrian foreigners, the tyranny of caste. The certainty of popularity was the bait held out by the greasy respectability of the London Times, and poetical vanity swallowed it, making Mr Swinburne also among the panders in his denunciation of Irish Nationalism.

To Mr Zox is chiefly due the formation of the Union of Female Workers, Servants, and Shop-girls in Melbourne. There is no class called upon to endure more petty tyranny and injustice, more hard work and insult, and there is no class which finds less real sympathy and help. Cannot stupid Sydney follow suit?

This was one of the most horrible crimes of our time. A band of young ruffians assaulted, violated, and frightfully maltreated a young girl of rather dubious character. Nine were arraigned, seven condemned to death, and four hanged. The trial was most indecently hurried by a Judge who seemed determined to make the affair, from the aspect of law and justice, as evilly noteworthy as from other aspects of it.

Charles I. and Stafford, e.g.