Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870) is the second poetry collection by Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon.
[1] On its original publication a reviewer in The Argus, aware of the poet's recent death, wrote: "Mr. Gordon was a man of cultivated and refined mind, and of more than average literary taste and talent.
Although he affected Swinburne and Browning, and drew considerably upon the storehouse of epithet and adjective which those gentlemen have left unlocked for the use of future generations, he displayed a natural vigour and force which trended upon, if it did not touch, originality.".
A marvellous command of rhyme, a musical ear for rhythm, a power of saying what he meant to say forcibly and clearly, are, we should say, the three salient points in the character of the 'author of Ashtaroth.'
Yet every here and there gleam out little specks and veins of gold, as in the dull common rock you may detect, if you are so fortunate, the slitter of the true metal; and it is the very presence of these precious morsels that is so surprising — how the same pen could at the same time produce so much that is good and so much that is utterly worthless.