Hearts grow withered and locks grow white,
Dodging the joys that a man should know,
Shirking the fight that a man should fight.
There are keen sight and shrewd sense underlying Bourke’s verses. There is sentiment, too, intermingled with pathos, in many places—as in “His Letter from W.A.”
It’s scarcely six months since I left Cooranbean,
But seems longer than all of last year;
The moon ain’t so bright and the grass ain’t so green,
And the sky, somehow, isn’t so clear.
Oh! I’d give all their towns to the very last brick,
And the mines with the forchins they yield,