In his earliest poems, published when he was little more than nineteen, be it remembered, and which (most of them) must therefore have been written when we has little more than a boy, the sadness of his song is sometimes from disappointed ambition, as in "Bells beyond the Forest."
"Like to one who, by the waters
Standing, marks the reeling ocean wave
Moaning, hide his head all torn and shivered,
Underneath his lonely cave.
So the soul within me glances at the tides
of Purpose where they creep—
Dashed to fragments by the yawning
ridges circling Life's tempestuous Deep!
Oh, the tattered leaves are dropping—
Dropping round me like a fall of rain,
While the dust of many a broken aspiration
Sweeps my troubled brain.
With the yearning after Beauty, and the
longing to be good and great,
And the thought of catching Fortune flying
on the tardy wings of Fate."
There is something of the same sort of sadness in the "Dark-haired Maid of Gerringong." And even in his happy reminiscences of Wollongong, most unexpectedly, in the midst of gladness, he brings in that exquisite image:
"Merry feet go clambering up the old
and thunder-shattered heap.
And the billows clamber after—
and the surges to the ocean leap—
Scattered into fruitless showers—
falling where the breakers roll,
Baffled—like the aspirations of a
proud, ambitious soul."
