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Note contribution of Robert Gordon Menzies in review [p. 57 – 59] “”A Century of Australian Song” (Part II) During the past twenty-five years the whole character of Australian verse has been so deeply coloured by the immense influence of “The Bulletin,” that it would be futile to consider the writers of that period in any save on group.[/] But three prominent names must be looked at first, for, though Brunton Stephens, Victor Daley and Essex Evans, from the point of view of mere chronology, come inside the “Bulletin” period, from the point of view of mere chronology, come inside the “Bulletin” period, there is a distinct cleavage in manner and matter between their work and that of Paterson, Lawson, and their co-literateurs,

[p. 58] James Brunton Stephens (1835 – 1902) was an Englishman born, who came to Australia at the age of 31, and entered the hard-working ranks of the “civil scribery.” The routine of clerkdom proved quite insufficient to prevent a fine and scholarly soul from expressing itself, and Australian literature is for that the richer, Stephens was a staunch advocate of Australian Federation; his two odes written in 1873 and 1883, foretelling the advent of a united Australia, are a fine expression of the vision animating the minds of those who saw clearly the pettiness and waste of the separate and contending States’ systems His expression is Tennysonian: –
“For even as, from sight concealed,
By never flush of dawn revealed,
Nor e’er illumed by golden noon,
Nor sunset streaked with crimson bar,
Nor silver-spanned by wake of moon,
Nor visited by any star,
Beneath these lands a river waits to bless,
(So men divine) our utmost wilderness.”

His dream is realised the new century dawns; he sees –

“Our sundering lines with love o’ergrown,
Our bounds the girdling seas alone.”

To the student of the war-interpretation and growth of our Federal constitution, Stephens’ statement may appear rather the expression of a pious wish than an actual realisation, but there can be no doubting the splendur of his ideal-an ideal that speaks to the Australia of to-day clearly and insistently: –
“The task to build,
Into the fabric of the world,
The substance of our hope fulfilled –
To work as those who greatly have divined.
The lordship of a continent assigned
As God’s own gift for service of mankind.”

As is perhaps not unnatural in one who came to Australia as a grown man, and lived his life in the heat of the cities, there is in Stephens an absence of that characteristically Australian atmosphere in which the bushmen of Paterson and Lawson move.”