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Enclosed within a Roman wall
   An old-world garden hidden lies,
Where gorgeous tulips, slim and tall,
   Tilt fragile cups with laughing eyes.   
Upon the green, close shaven lawn,
   Where graceful pampas grasses sway,
And beauty long ago was born,
Sunlight and shadow ever play.

An antique dial long since grey,
   With moss-rimmed pedestal for throne,
Dreams 'mid these lovely colours gay
   Of all the changes it has known.
For here once walked in pensive mood
   An Abbot with his breviary,
Who murmured oft beneath his hood
   A "Miserere Dominie."

Yonder, long bearded, stonily
   Time's statue, with his scythe, looks o'er
This place of hallowed memory,
   Haunted in spirit evermore.
Only one brush with magic power
   Could paint the buds enlaced with dew,   
Day, golden-winged, the lilac hour,
   Soft thisteldowns beneath the blue.

The gilded hands have backward sped,
   And with the old, enchanting spell
The cloak of years has gently fled,
  While chords of sweet, lost music swell.
Across the grass comes smiling youth,
   I ask of Time, "Can this be Me ?"
"Ah, yet, it once was you in truth,"
   And then he breathed "Eternity."

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 9 April 1927

Author: Emily Coungeau (1860-1936) was born in Essex, England, and migrated to Australia in 1887, following three of her brothers.  She married in 1889 in Richmond, Melbourne and moved to Brisbane where she and her husband ran a very successful wine saloon. She began publishing poetry in 1913 and produced four collections of her verse during her lifetime.  She died in Brisbane in 1936.

Author reference sites: Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography

See also.

Come, soul, and bury the dead old year;
   Time was when she was fair,
Though now her body be shrunk and sere,
   Gone the gold of her hair.

In the cathedral of memory
   Set up escutcheon meet,
And with her sisters --- the years gone by ---   
   Give her embalming sweet.

A warm tear over her ashes drop --
   True wife was she to you;
She bore you many a darling hope,
   And blessings not a few.

First published in The Queenslander, 7 January 1882; and again in the same newspaper on 23 December 1882.

Author: Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen (1856-1947) was born in London and studied at Trinity College Oxford before arriving in Australia in 1879.  Following his BA from Oxford he took a law degree at the University of Melbourne before settling in Sydney after being appointed the first lecturer in modern history at the University of Sydney.  He returned to England in 1884 but maintained an interest in Australian poetry, especially that of Adam Lindsay Gordon.

Author reference sites: Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography

See also.