A BUSH SECTION
Now the gully is hidden, the logs and the paddock all hidden.
Brightly the Stars shine out!....
The sky is a wide black paddock, without any fences,
The Stars are its shining logs;
Here, sparse and single, but yonder, as logg’d-up for burning,
Close in a cluster of light.
And the thin clouds, they are the hills,
They are the spurs of the heavens,
On whose steepnesses scatter’d, the Star-logs silently lie:
Dimm’d as it were by the distance, or maybe in mists of the mountain
Tangled—yet still they brighten, not darken, the thick-strewn slopes!
But see! these hills of the sky
They waver and move! their gullies are drifting, and driving;
Their ridges, uprooted,
Break, wander and flee, they escape! casting careless behind them
Their burdens of brightness, the Stars, that rooted remain.
—No! they do not remain. No! even they cannot be steadfast.
For the curv’d Three (that yonder
So glitter and sparkle
There, over the bails),
This morning, at dawn,
At the start of the milking,
Stood pale on the brink of yon rocky-ledged hill;
And the Cross, o’er the viaduct
Now, then was slanting,
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