Straightway he stood at heaven's gate,
Abashed and trembling for his sin:
I trow he had not long to wait,

For God came out and led him in.

And then there ran a radiant pair,

Ruddy with haste and eager-eyed, To meet him first upon the stairHis wife and child beatified.

They clad him in a robe of light,
And gave him heavenly food to eat;
Great seraphs praised him to the height,
Archangels sat about his feet.

God, smiling, took him by the hand,

And led him to the brink of heaven: He saw where systems whirling stand, Where galaxies like snow are driven.

Dead silence reigned; a shudder ran

Through space; Time furled his wearied wings; A slow adagio then began,

Sweetly resolving troubled things.

The dead were heralded along:

As if with drums and trumps of flame,
And flutes and oboes keen and strong,
A brave andante singing came.

Then like a python's sumptuous dress,
The frame of things was cast away,

And out of Time's obscure distress

The conquering scherzo thundered Day.

He doubted; but God said, "Even so:
Nothing is lost that's wrought with tears.

The music that you made below

Is now the music of the spheres."

CANADIAN POETRY

[BY PROFESSOR PELHAM EDGAR, TORONTO]

In writing of Canadian poetry one can be more enthusiastic in anticipation than in retrospect. We were slow in making a beginning. Until the eighties of the last century everything with us had been weakly imitative, and Howe, Heavysege, Sangster, and MacLachlan, the poets of the earlier time, are mere names in a meaningless enumeration. The poets of Lampman's generation gave us our real start, and since then we have accumulated a body of verse that is sufficiently distinguished to merit attention beyond the limits of our local boundaries.

It is mistaken kindness to expect of the transatlantic poet something naïvely crude and aboriginal. In any event our poets have never responded to any tacit invitation to eccentricity, and we can point to no abnormal developments born of the desire to be at all costs and hazards Canadian. In French Canada, indeed, since the passing of that eminently national poet Fréchette, the tendency has been quite in the other direction, and in the interesting work of Nelligan and Jean Morin the divorce from local influence is absolute. Our English Canadian poets of the recent time have submitted themselves to a dual control, leaving their minds open alike to the suggestions that flow in from their immediate surroundings and to the impressions inspired by contact with the world's best thought. If the imputation of provinciality still clings to us it is for the reason that we are not even yet in the main current of ideas, and our intellectual life has not yet reached the pitch of intensity that demands artistic utterance. Our early writers suffered the inevitable penalties of isolation, and not knowing where to turn for inspiration they became timid copyists of indifferent models. Their successors, with a surer sense of poetic values, have written in a spirit of free and ideal imitation, and have been wisely content to let their originality take care of itself, knowing instinctively that a distinguishing quality would inevitably communicate itself to their work either from the special conditions of their environment, or, if they were themselves not highly sensitive to local suggestion, at least from the special complexion of their own minds.

Miss Valancy Crawford is the earliest writer of whose work specimens are reproduced in the following selections. When we OETHead her verse we realize how wide is the distance to be traversed

can be n

from the servile copy to the work which, though it may originate a Irin a fertile hint of method or suggestion of thought in some foreign source, is still the authentic utterance of a single mind. Until Miss Valancy Crawford began to write, this arduous intellectual journey had not been attempted, and were it not for the fact that her worth was so long unsuspected by the public she might fittingly Hearst be acclaimed the "Mother of Canadian poetry."

were s

me, are

Who the father may be is a question of late much and idly disputed. It is safest to accept the multiple parentage suggested in have the first paragraph, which derives our lineage from the middle eighties of the last century. Much fresh, inspired, and inspiring work came then from the Eastern Provinces, where Mr. C. G. D. the Roberts and Mr. Bliss Carman were young men together with no In a thought of a career outside of poetry; from Ottowa, where Lampon man and Mr. D. C. Scott had formed one of those friendships sbon which sweeten the records of literature; and from Toronto, where Frend Mr. Wilfred Campbell, a more solitary figure, had began to produce his lyrics descriptive of the Great Lake region. A score of names might be added to make the tale of our Canadian poetry complete; but these men pointed the way, and their significance as orginators, no less than the inherent merits of their work, will ensure them a perpetuity at least of local fame.

Viewing their poetry attentively one is impressed by the fact that they are not novices in the art of verse. They have perfected themselves in so far as their genius permitted by a deliberate study of the masters of the craft, and it is a sufficiently simple thing to (note, especially in their early work, reflections of the manner, and sometimes of the thought, of Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, or Browning. Their verse, then, is civilized enough, and, to a European reader curious of novelties and solicitous of the "barbaric yawp" of young democracy, it may seem at first unduly tentative and tame. But it will soon be evident to such a reader that their work is something more than a mere imitative exercise. Each of these men has his own characteristic and individual note, and into the work of all enters the breath of the wind-washed spaces of our new continent.

Mr. Carman and Mr. Roberts have for many years past ceased to live in Canada, yet their influence notably persists in the work

of many of our younger writers. They have founded no school of poetry, yet it counts much for inspiration that they have established a standard of artistic excellence in a new land. Each has his special votaries among us, but many of us seem to find an ampler development of power in the work of Mr. D. C. Scott, whose poetry by an unusual process of growth has increasing freshness and vitality as the years go by. Mr. William Archer once noted the "magically luminous phrases" in which his verse abounds. These felicities he has never lost, and he gives us now a poetry in which emotion and thought, the sensation and the idea, are glowly fused. He would be an interesting poet in any country.

ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD

[BORN in Dublin, 1850; died at Toronto, 1887. She came to Canada as a child. She published one volume: Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and Other Poems. Her collected poems appeared in 1905, edited by Mr. J. W. Garvin, and with an introduction by Miss Ethelwyn Wetherald.]

Isabella Valancy Crawford used to print her verses in the corners of a Toronto evening paper, and she gathered them into a volume shortly before she died. Her talent might have asserted itself more victoriously with altered conditions, but under circumstances apparently the most adverse it refused to acknowledge defeat. She was poor, she was isolated from intellectual friendships, she was without recognition, and almost, one may say, without a country-for she left Ireland too young to have her memories rooted there, and had grown up in a land that had but feebly as yet developed its sense of nationhood. The only patriotic theme that inspired her was the Riel rebellion with its three dead heroes.

We can discover models, or at least sources of inspiration, for her younger contemporaries, for Mr. Roberts, Mr. Carman, and Archibald Lampman, but in Miss Crawford's case it is not possible to name either her masters on her disciples in the craft of verse. The certain strokes of her art proclaim her of the great tradition, yet she is not the slave of any particular style. She is not a picker up of discarded phrases nor a renovator of outworn themes. Her

charm is peculiarly her own, and had her opportunities for literary intercourse been greater her originality, the most precious of her gifts, might conceivably have been less. One is sensible throughout her work of the springing vigour of her poetic fancy, and of the unfailing wealth of her imagery, which is "fresh and has the dew upon it." Miss Wetherald, whose introduction to the Collected Poems deserves to be read, speaks of her power of striking out in direct and forcible phrases "the athletic imagery that crowded her brain," and nothing indeed is more remarkable than the energetic way in which she conceives and executes her themes. What has been said of her may seem excessive praise, but if one accepts these superlatives as bearing upon the work of an avowedly minor poet they may be condoned. One last thing to note in a young poetry so preponderatingly descriptive as ours is Valancy Crawford's entire freedom from pedantry. She strikes no bargain with nature, but she looks outwards with unspoiled eyes and combines all her century's passion for beauty with the simplicity of a less sophisticated time.

LA BLANCHISSEUSE

Margaton at early dawn.

Thro' the vineyard takes her way,
With her basket piled with lawn
And with kerchiefs red and gay,
To the stream which babbles past
Grove, château, and clanking mill.
As it runs it chatters fast

Like a woman with a will:
"Blanchisseuse, Blanchisseuse,
Here I come from Picardy!

Hurry off thy wooden shoes,

I will wash thy clothes with thee!”

Margaton's a shapely maid;

Laughter haunts her large, soft eye;
When she trips by vineyard shade

Trips the sun with her, say I.
Wooden shoes she lays aside,

Puts her linen in the rill;