PREFACE.
The author of the following poems died twenty-five years ago. Some of them appeared in various Sydney newspapers, while he was yet living, but many are now printed for the first time. Such exercises were rather the solace and diversion than the serious business of any portion of his literary career—a career which was, unfortunately, as brief as it was full of promise. Distinguished among the journalists of his day, he also made no unimportant mark in what may be termed the regular field of letters. His work on New South Wales, the publication of which, in London, was coincident with his death in that city, at the early age of thirty-three, is justly regarded as a permanently valuable contribution to Australian history. Besides this, he wrote a series of papers in the Empire news-
