The deep blue sides wax dusky and the tall green trees grow dim,
The sward beneath me seems to heave and fall;
And sickly smoky shadows through the sleepy sunlight swim,
And on the very sun's face weave their pall.
Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead."
Since his death imitators of his style, and adapters of some of his ideas have arisen, and among them a Mr. Mowbray Morris, once aide-de-camp to Sir Jas. Fergusson, published, under the title of "A Voice from the Bush," what looked very much like plagiarism of "The Sick Stockrider." This is not the place for a critical review or contrast between the two compositions, but even the late John Howard Clarke was almost deceived in awarding to Mr. Morris the palm justly due to Gordon. In much of the poetry of the latter mysterious forebodings as to an early death appear. In "Doubtful Dreams" he thus alludes to the grim topic—
"There is an end to all things; a season to every man.
Whose glory is dust and ashes, whose spirit is but a spark
That out of the darkness flashes, and flickers out into the dark."
Mr. Gordon was of retiring disposition, and subject to fits of melancholy; he was also strongly imbued with the doctrine of fatality. Death had no terrors for him, and a pistol-shot terminated his existence in June, 1870. He died by his own hand on the sea shore, amid the surroundings of wind and wave, though the motives which led to this rash act have never been made clear; those who saw him an hour before it occurred observed nothing in his demeanour to infer that he contemplated self-destruction. After his decease sundry notices of the talented genius thus lost to the colonies
