"This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power,
inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse
that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of
course, excepting the complete 'Poetical Works' of the same author).
_That_ is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of
passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The
uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the
misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,
This putrid death,
This flesh-feast of the few,
This social structure of red mud,
This edifice of slime,
Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood,
Whose pinnacle is crime!
Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the
quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks,
but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell 'of our own
manufacture,' whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old
village by the Thames--(trade mark, 'Commerce and Christ.')"--SYDNEY
JEPHCOTT, "_Australian Standard_."