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“My rymes, are they stale? If my metre

is varied, one chime rings through all;

one chime—though I sing more or sing less,

I have but one string to my lute.”

I doubt, I say, whether under any circumstances Gordon would have produced, as Mr. Hammersley thought, “poems worthy to be ranked with some of the masterpieces of the English language.” He had not patience enough, he had not clear-sightedness enough! “A more dare-devil rider,” says Mr. Hammersley, “never crossed a horse.... As a steeplechase rider he was, of course, in the very first rank, and his name is indelibly associated with many of the most famous chases run in Victoria, although in my opinion, and I think in that of many good judges too, he was deficient in what is termed ‘good hands,’ and when it came to a finish was far behind a Mount or a Watson.” (And, considering his shortsightedness, which Mr. Woods designates as “painful,” this is not to be wondered at). It is the same with his poetry. All in his poetry that is good has been done at a rush; the rest is inferior, poor, and sometimes quite worthless. He has little, if any, sense of real artistic workmanship either in whole or in parts: “he is deficient in what is termed ‘good hands.’” Take, for instance, his dramatic lyric, “Ashtaroth.” It is worth reading. There are two beautiful songs in it, “On the Current,” and “Oh! days and years departed.” There are a few fine passages, a few fine dramatic touches, in it, and one splendid outburst of Orion’s (“I hate thee not, thy grievous plight”), but the poem, taken as a whole is, I say, worth reading. Many of the speeches are weak, and some are not poetry at all, but rymed prose, and bad at that. A sustained effort, such as a piece like this requires, was impossible to him. I say nothing of the ludicrous attempt at an adaptation of Faust, Mephistopheles and Margarete, which is the basis of the poem: I merely remark that, judged by its own poor standard of judgment, it is quite a failure. Perhaps some day we shall have a selection from the poet’s work, from which what is worthless will be eliminated, in order that all our attention may be fixed on what is good, and perhaps the selector will have the courage to dismiss all this poem, save some dozen or so of extracts, into the gulf of oblivion or an appendix. Encumbered as Gordon at present is with such an amount of worthless work, there is a danger that much of what is good may perish also.