As a rule, however, Gordon is distinctly English, and the landscapes he describes are always the landscapes of our own country.  He writes about mediaeval lords and ladies in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde, about Cavaliers and Roundheads in The Romance of Britomarte, and Ashtaroth, his longest and most ambitious poem, deals with the adventures of the Norman barons and Danish knights of ancient days.  Steeped in Swinburne and bewildered with Browning, he set himself to reproduce the marvellous melody of the one and the dramatic vigour and harsh strength of the other.  From the Wreck is a sort of Australian edition of the Ride to Ghent.  These are the first three stanzas of one of the so-called Bush Ballads: 

   On skies still and starlit
      White lustres take hold,
   And grey flashes scarlet,
      And red flashes gold. 
   And sun-glories cover
   The rose, shed above her,
   Like lover and lover
      They flame and unfold.

. . . . .

   Still bloom in the garden
      Green grass-plot, fresh lawn,
   Though pasture lands harden
      And drought fissures yawn. 
   While leaves, not a few fall,
   Let rose-leaves for you fall,
   Leaves pearl-strung with dewfall,
      And gold shot with dawn.

   Does the grass-plot remember
      The fall of your feet
   In Autumn’s red ember
      When drought leagues with heat,
   When the last of the roses
   Despairingly closes
   In the lull that reposes
      Ere storm winds wax fleet?

And the following verses show that the Norman Baron of Ashtaroth had read
Dolores just once too often: 

   Dead priests of Osiris, and Isis,
      And Apis! that mystical lore,
   Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis
      Of fever, is studied no more;
   Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles
      The arch of yon firmament vast
   Looks calm, like a host of white angels
      On dry dust of votaries past.

   On seas unexplored can the ship shun
      Sunk rocks?  Can man fathom life’s links,
   Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian
      Or Theban, unspoken by Sphynx? 
   The riddle remains yet, unravell’d
      By students consuming night oil. 
   O earth! we have toil’d, we have travailed: 
      How long shall we travail and toil?

By the classics Gordon was always very much fascinated.  He loved what he calls ‘the scroll that is godlike and Greek,’ though he is rather uncertain about his quantities, rhyming ‘Polyxena’ to ‘Athena’ and ‘Aphrodite’ to ‘light,’ and occasionally makes very rash statements, as when he represents Leonidas exclaiming to the three hundred at Thermopylae: 

   ’Ho! comrades let us gaily dine—­
      This night with Plato we shall sup,’