was a true poet, and that had there been three prizes,
the second and third would have gone to Kendall's other poems --
"The Glen of Arrawatta" and "Dungog".

The result of winning this prize was that Kendall decided to
abandon routine work and try to earn his living as a writer.
He resigned his position in the Colonial Secretary's Office
on the 31st March, 1869, and shortly afterwards left for Melbourne,
where his wife and daughter soon joined him. Melbourne was then
a centre of greater literary activity than Sydney. Neither then, however,
nor for a long time to come, was any number of people in Australia
sufficiently interested in local literature (apart from journalism)
to warrant the most gifted writer in depending upon his pen for support.
Still, Kendall managed to persuade Mr. George Robertson,
the principal Australian bookseller of those days, to undertake the risk
of his second book of poems -- `Leaves from Australian Forests' --
which was published towards the end of 1869. But though the volume
showed a great advance in quality upon its predecessor,
it was a commercial failure, and the publisher lost ninety pounds over it.

In Melbourne, Kendall wrote prose, as well as satirical and serious verse,
for most of the papers. The payment was small; in fact,
only a few newspapers then paid anything for verse. He made a little money
by writing the words for a cantata, "Euterpe", sung at the opening of
the Melbourne Town Hall in 1870. At the office of `The Colonial Monthly',
edited by Marcus Clarke, he met the best of the Melbourne literati,
and, though his reserved manner did not encourage intimacy,
one of them -- George Gordon McCrae -- became a close and true friend.
Lindsay Gordon, too, admired Kendall's poems, and learned to respect
a man whose disposition was in some ways like his own.