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Minor edits made in pencil throughout text. Note contributions of Robert Gordon Menzies in article “”De Natura”: It is a queer fate indeed by which even the modern University is inclined to look askance at him who aspires to dub himself poet, be he the veriest of scrawlers, or a genius born to hear the music of all the world. Take your student “poet”; he is considered queer, to put it mildly, and his sporadic outbursts, duly enshrined in the pages of a perhaps indulgent “Uni- [p. 85] versity Magazine,” are glanced at by the average reader, noted quickly by the length of the lines as poetry – (Oh, wonderful perception!) and so passed over, with too often a mental sneer at the expense of the one whose initials stand below. “Ah, well, he’s a bit simple!” Voilà tout!

Is this right? Is it just and consistent that students who pride themselves on having at home an expensively bound copy of their Wordsworth or their Tennyson, should prove their utter hypocrisy and cant by ignoring cheaply the attempts, crude though they be, to express thoughts a little higher than the everyday?

I please for poetry – poetry of the best sort. As an Australian I look forward to the day when Australian literature will take a very high place among the treasures of all time. This result can only be achieved by a cultivation of the best, and the careful fostering of all the buds of early promise, that abound this springtime of our land. True, Australian poetry enjoys a certain vogue; but I am inclined to question the accuracy of the popular taste. There are many to whom Adam Lindsay Gordon’s stockwhip melodies are well known, and “How We Beat the Favourite” may be glibly quoted; but how many are there who have walked with a greater far then Gordon? How many have heard the thunder rumbling along the lines of Kendall, or seen with him the lightning play about the distant peaks? Kendall’s ode “To a Mountain” I hold to be the most Wordsworthian production our local poetry exhibits, and Kendall our greatest poet; and why? Simply because he has trodden in solitude the wonderful places of our land; has trembled before the wild majesty of the hills; has watched with a poet’s exaltation for “the filtered lights, and lutes of soft refrain, of many a mountain spring.”

Here is no reek of the stable!-
“In thy deep, green, gracious glens
The silver fountains sing for ever. Far
Above dim ghosts of waters in the caves,
The royal robe of morning on thy head
Abides for ever! Evermore the wind
Is thy august companion; and they peers
Are cloud, and thunder, and the face sublime
Of the mid-heaven! On thy awful brow
Is deity; and in that voice of thine
There is the great imperial utterance
Of God for ever!”

We live in a stirring age, my masters, but at times it is good for us to be alone – alone with Nature, inscrutable as of yore, but telling wondrous tales to those who will but listen to her. It is good for the human soul, obsessed with petty cares, and smarting under its real or fancied troubles, that one should stand awhile and look out across the rolling ocean, the symbol of power and of eternity. At such times a vague sense of awe must come upon the dullest watcher; the music of the wind and wave is a harmony that cleanses and elevates.

We live in a world of work; a world often careworn, often sordid, often sad; but it is surely good that we should take time to search for another world – a world that need only be sought to be found; with the subtle appeal of its foaming torrent and its sweeping tide; and, through all, its inexpressible glory, and the wonder which weaves itself about it!
R.G.M. [pp. 84 – 85].” Also poem: “Farewell Sonnet” [p. 94]: (To the Members of the Melbourne University Rifles leaving for Europe with the Imperial Expeditionary Force. September, 1914)

“Farwell, brave hearts!” The simple words proclaim
The passage of swift years, and the swift leap
Of worlds to arms, and with no laggard’s creep,
Your answer to the call. Oh, deathless name
Of glory shall be yours; your glowing fame
Be one with those who saw the mighty sweep
Of Trafalgar, and heard upon the deep
The guns boom out the sceptred Island’s claim;

Heroes they were, and heroes too shall be
Ye who now leave an Alma Mater’s home
To fight ‘neath skies of strange emblazonry
Far, far beyond the rolling ocean’s foam.
Poor are we left! Yet go, ye honoured brave,
To the right the wronged, to triumph, and to Save!

R. G. M.