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Now let us hear what another Australian critic, one who cares more about finding out the real deep true significance of Gordon and his poetry than of glorifying the amour-propre of this class or of that: let us hear what Mr. Marcus Clarke has to say. “Written as they were” (as Gordon’s poems were) “at odd times in leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous life, it is not to be wondered at if they are unequal and unfinished. The astonishment of those who knew the man, and can gauge the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct, is, that such work was ever produced here at all.”—What a different tone is this from that of our first and enthusiastic critic! “Unequal and unfinished”—“astonishment that such work was ever produced here at all!” But this is not all that Mr. Clarke has to say about Gordon’s poetry: he has also to notice what influence was at work in it, and (most important of all!) what is its real deep true significance. He talks of Gordon “owning nothing but a love for horsemanship and a head full of Browning and Shelley,” and follows this up by saying that “the influence of Browning and of Swinburne” (who, as we all know, has been, creatively and demonstratively, the chief prophet in his generation of the poet who, he likes to think, is ‘beloved above all other poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word, and the only proper word,—divine’)—“the influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer’s taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense of natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living.” Well, and the conclusion of the whole matter? “The student of these unpretending volumes will be repaid for his labour. He will find in them something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.”