Читать книгу Australian Essays онлайн

22 страница из 38

“In thy grandeur, oh sea! we acknowledge,

in thy fairness, oh earth! we confess,

hidden truths that are taught in no college,

hidden songs that no parchment express.”

And, as for the pedants of the Old World, why! (as we know)

“They are slow, very slow, in discerning

that book-lore and wisdom are twain.”

Here, then, is the first charm in Gordon, and his work; they are modern, they represent the main-current of the age, not some side-water or back-water, that are perhaps nice enough in their way, but still—side-waters or back-waters, and only side-waters or back-waters.

Gordon and his work are modern, but not wholly modern; he belongs, as I have said, to a period of transition. Like Mary Magdalene, he feels that “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” He has lost the Old, and he has not won the New Faith. He is a poet of the twilight and the dawn. “On this earth so rough,” he says,

“on this earth so rough, we know quite enough,

and, I sometimes fancy, a little too much,”