Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1889-07-21

Mount Despair, and the llke-suggeSt L
the traveller the sufferings of hopeless ex
p'orers, like Burke, Wills and Leichhardt
, who have lain down TO perish of thirst anG
its kindred madness. 4 stern and funerea
melancholia surrounds the ghostly rattle
of the white bark as it drops from the gun
| trees, like ashes sprinkled on the grave O
the dying year. In the black gorges O
these stern and forbidding peaks is stihec
the story of sullen despair, as when the
weary traveller sank down to die, with
dreams of England's hawthorn hedget
lanes in his brain and the dewy incense O
kentish hopfelds creeping, for the last
time, over the senses of his parting soul.
In other lands the poet has drawn from
earth and air, from swelling sea and
bourneless sky, the inspiration which
soothes the senses and satisfies the soul
but in the desolate mountains and treelesS
plains, the poets soul drinks in the
thought of ferocious anger or sullen def,
ance, which wraps itself about the barren
majesty of the Australian Alps. More
men have perished from thirst in "t the
Bush in the past half century than in all
America or Europe in FIVE times that pc.
riod. | can never forget the long dawn OF
morning in Melbourne, when it was
broad daylight at o'clock, nearly three
hours before the sun began to redden the
sky above the blue Dandenough hills
My walk, impelled by friends sudden
illness, led me down Punt Hill in South
1arra, towards st. Kilda. Whether the
same feeling ever came over another man
at such an hour, | am unable to say. But
its OppresSiveness has not vet left me-
The vast city with its gloomy rows OF
brick and stone buildings; the silent and
sluggish 1arra, flowing as lazily TO the
far-otf sea as it did on the day when Bat
man and Hoddle first pitched their tents
on Spencer hill; the broad and stony
streets, stretching over twelve miles OF
diameter in the suburbs, without sign OF
humanity stirring, all these made up sad
picture to the American whose mind re-
called the dull gray of morning receding
before the encarnadine glow that surrounds
the chariot of Ph9bus. Oregon is the
land of the long twilight, Australia that OF
the long dawn. Wrapped up forever in
the mornings mantle of mist her history
rises out of the ocean of oblivion, her ira
ditions loom up before the student OF
nature i'll a grandeur so vague as to be alb
solutely gigantic and she seems to saw,
with her thousand tongues of rock and
tree, before your land was | ami
The same weird melancholy that over
hangs the marvellous metropolis forces it.
self on your contemplation as YOU ride
through the somber forests of the worlds
Oldest land. The lonely stockrider. GAL
Looping along through the bush, between
waning moonlight and coming day, sees
vast shadows creepiag noiseleSsly over the
trackless and illimitable plains. He hears
weird sounds to which his ears are
strangers, in the hoarse croak of the birds
that cannot fly, and the beasts that iump
but cannot run. And out of this upset
ting of natures handiwork, while behold
ing all about him vegetation long since
persisted from every other fair land of
earth, he feels that the sleek and tidy civ
ilization amid which he firsts saw the light,
becomes tame and dumb beside the grand
eur and contemptuous loneliness of mount
ain peak and forest shade that was con-
temporaneous with an era in which Hum
boldt had cradled the very founders of his
race. The poetry of the Australian bush
speaks to the silent worshiper at ma
ture's shrine as no other land can speak,
As Marcus Clarke said in one of the chap
ters of the greatest novel written in the
past thirty years, "His Natural Life"
that Europe is the home of knightiy
song and heroic deeds, while Asia sinks
beneath weighty memories of her past
magnihcenee like the Suttee sinks, bur
dened with her jewels, upon the corpse of
dead grandeur, destructive even in its
death. America hurries swiftly on her
way, glittering and Unsuitable as her own
waterfalls. From the jungles of Africa
and the tangled groves of the South Sea
islands arise, from the glowing hearts of
a thousand varied flowers, the intoxicat-
ing odors that dwell in barbaric sensualitv.
In Australia alone is found the weird and
grotesque, the strange scribblings of Ma
ture learning how TO write"
1t was, perhaps, my years of rambling.
with rod and gun, in the somber silence OF
Oregon's forests and California's towering
Sierras, that bred in my mind thirst to
see the land where Burke and Wills per
ished of hunger, and where LEIGH hardt's
bones rest in an unmarked grave, because
unknown. That longing was satisfied
through the kindness of a worthy chief
magistrate, now private citizen of the
republic. | have come home thoroughly
satisfied with all I have seen, and more
American in spirit than ever but |
roughed it Just enough, in the bush, the
fantastic land of monstrosities begotten be.
fore Moses handed down the tablets of the
law, to comprehend the subtle charm OF
It's solitude and drink in the lesson of its
vague mystery. The myriad tongues OF
the wilderness whispered to me their man.
fold doctrines in the language of the hag-
gard and the supernatural The ghostly
gum trees, distorted with the siroccos OF
January or pinched with the frosts of July,
when the Southern Cross seemed frozen
into a nebular ocean OF cloudless blue
Ecurmured to me the song of a land that
had stood still, like stony dreamer, while
empires rose and fell, while nations grew
and decayed. The Elusive phantom Of
Australias solitudes furnished their own
Interpretation, and left the wayfarer from
across the seas to realize, in the poetry OF
her deSolation, why the patriarchs elder
son should sell his birthright and still
love his heritage of barren sands better
than all the fatted focks and gorgeous
apparel that surrounded his ancestral
halls.
A Dogs Love of Soda.
Acquired tastes are found not only