Notes:
Dedication: Dedicated (ironically) to James Martin, Esq., M.L.C.
Notes:
Author's note: Annexed to the original manuscript of this poem I had the following note which I now publish along with it, because it will somewhat explicate the kind of feeling that prompted the ironical dedication of such a lyric to Mr. Martin ; a man narrow-minded enough in the first place, and impudent enough in the second, to talk contemptuously of "poetry and that sort of thing," to quote his own most elegant expression.
The note to the manuscript runs thus:-
Notes:
This poem, I think, will indicate to the philosophical reader, how painfully I have been sometimes subjected to vulgar annoyance, and how poetically I have at such times struggled against the unspiritualising influences obtruded upon me by the sordid generation of which I am unfortunately a member - that is, numerically. Other wise I am not of the present men of Australia, nor could I mass myself down, endeavour to do so as I might, into the dead miry slough of their intellectual grossness. I speak strongly ; but if I do so, it is from feeling as strongly, how all that is immortal in my being has been wronged and obstructed by the tone of the society which it has been my lot to herd with during the best years of my life. Throughout my whole manhood, hitherto, I have had to mix daily with men whose natures could value nothing in mine that I valued myself ;- with men, in short, who have no faith for anything in God's glorious universe that is not, in their own vile phrase, "money, or money's worth." And some of these are rich men ! and for such cattle to be rich, without being offensive, is a sheer impossibility.
Notes:
But let it not be thought that I am spurred into this mood by my worldly unsuccess, or by my countrymen's neglect or my assumed (and partially admitted) intellectual powers. Food and raiment, and that which buys them, are not the rewards of genius: for these it must be content to do as the rest of the world does - toil and contrive as best it may. Neither can it derive any sanction from the countenance of the selfish, the flipant, the stupid, the sensual : this can only inspire it with doubts of itself, and, if at all deferred to, so far soil its integrity. But it must look for its peculiar and appropriate needs to a lofty self-sustaining consciousness of the worth and beauty of its own proper productions and to the loving harmony which these evoke from all kindred spirits. C. H.
