Rio Grande's Last Race, and Other Verses

THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER,

AND OTHER VERSES.

     By A. B. Paterson.

* "The immediate success of this book of bush ballads is without parallel in Colonial literary annals, nor can any living English or American poet boast so wide a public, always excepting Mr. Rudyard Kipling."

* "These lines have the true lyrical cry in them. Eloquent and ardent verses."

* "Swinging, rattling ballads of ready humour, ready pathos, and crowding adventure. . . . Stirring and entertaining ballads about great rides, in which the lines gallop like the very hoofs of the horses."

* "At his best he compares not unfavourably with the author of 'Barrack-Room Ballads'."

* Mr. A. Patchett Martin (London): "In my opinion, it is the absolutely un-English, thoroughly Australian style and character of these new bush bards which has given them such immediate popularity, such wide vogue, among all classes of the rising native generation."

* "Australia has produced in Mr. A. B. Paterson a national poet whose bush ballads are as distinctively characteristic of the country as Burns's poetry is characteristic of Scotland."

* "A book like this . . . is worth a dozen of the aspiring, idealistic sort, since it has a deal of rough laughter and a dash of real tears in its composition."

* "These ballads . . . are full of such go that the mere reading of them make the blood tingle. . . . But there are other things in Mr. Paterson's book besides mere racing and chasing, and each piece bears the mark of special local knowledge, feeling, and colour. The poet has also a note of pathos, which is always wholesome."

* "He gallops along with a by no means doubtful music, shouting his vigorous songs as he rides in pursuit of wild bush horses, constraining us to listen and applaud by dint of his manly tones and capital subjects . . . We turn to Mr. Paterson's roaring muse with instantaneous gratitude."