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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 1, 1929.)

Will H. Ogilvie Again

Will H. Ogilvie Again.

“A Handful of Leather,” by Will H. Ogilvie, illustrated by Lionel Edwards (Constable, London, per Whitcombe and Tombs). Will H. Ogilvie, after making his name as an page 43 Australasian poet, returned to the Old Country and settled down in his native Border town. He arrived in Australia in his twentieth year, and returned to Britain before completing his fortieth. He has been back in the Old Country another twenty. During his sojourn in Australia he became enamoured of the life and poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of the latter went to the making of Will H. Ogilvie. Though since his return “Home” he has sung of Border subjects, historical, traditional and local, ever and anon his muse harps back, if not to its former haunts, at least to its former loves. Is there not more than an echo of his Australian days and lays in the following verses from “The Land We Love” (1909):

Armstrongs and Elliots! You know where they were bred—
Above the dancing mountain burns, among the misty scaurs;
And through their veins, these Border lads, the raiding blood runs red,
The blood that's out before the dawn and home behind the stars!
Armstrongs and Elliots!!
And touch your glass with mine!
Armstrongs and Elliots! And how should they forget
The pride their fathers gathered round the roving, reckless names?
Can't you hear the horses neighing, and the riders jesting yet
Above a thousand driven steers and fifty farms in flames?
Armstrongs and Elliots!!
Stand up and drink to it!

Alter a few words in these verses and who, hearing them read for the first time, would guess that they were not written during his Australian days? Indeed, Mr. Ogilvie himself seems to have been carried away by the old familiar swing of the verses and imagined he was writing for an Australasian audience and not for Border Scots. In this, his latest volume, he returns to his early love—the horse, and in it he lets himself go, just as he did in “Fair Girls and Grey Horses,” “Heart of Gold,” etc., for the drum of hoofs, and the jingle of reins beat true to the music that thrills through his veins. To Will Ogilvie, as it was to Adam Lindsay Gordon, the speed of the horse is “an endless glory.” He hears again the hoof thuds of years agone and calls up the ghosts of old mates who have ridden with him in that “sunny country where the golden wattle grows.” This book contains much of the best things Will Ogilvie has ever done. The illustrations by Lionel Edwards are all that they should be. Australasian admirers of Will Ogilvie, not entirely for “auld acquaintance sake,” but for its own inherent merit, must procure this, his latest volume, if they would feel the old thrill once again. (Price 16/-.)

A Model Foundry. A section of the iron foundry at the Hutt Valley Workshops, Wellington.

A Model Foundry.
A section of the iron foundry at the Hutt Valley Workshops, Wellington.