Australian Poets 17881888 Author:Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: always been the prevailing opinion in the colonies with regard to colonial poets, than by a phrase I learned from a worthy Roman Catholic priest to whom I had oc... more »casion to complain of a. protege he had induced us to accept as a domestic servant. She had many excellent qualities, as I admitted, but also a fixed opiuion that the soup tureen was intended for coals. When she at length proceeded to boil potatoes in the fish-kettle. I thought it as well to interview the good cleric as to her mental state. I relieved my own mind by dwelling on the awkwardness of these domestic misconceptions, adding " she writes poetry, too." Then his eye lit up—" Oh !" said he, " poetry is it—away with her at once. We have a saying in Ireland when we wish to convey that a person is harmless, but not quite 'all there' in the upper story— a poor poet of a fellow I" I am sure that this is the light in which the Harpurs, Kendalls, and Gordons, while living, invariably appeared to their more bustling, more matter-of-fact, and therefore more prosperous fellow-colonists. Not that I think any of them had anything to complain of on the score of personal unkindness, or public contempt. They were not only tolerated, but in some cases even sheltered and treated kindly, particularly by the public men of New South Wales; but always, I imagine, from the feeling that they wero not quite able to look after themselves, not quite all there; in short, as poor harmless fellows whose disease was neither dangerous nor contagious. My own reminiscences are almost strictly confined to Victoria; of the poets of New South Wales I know nothing personally, save of Kendall, who made his home for a while in Melbourne. Even of Kendall and Gordon my recollections are dim and shadowy, for the one was dead, and the other had mi...« less