OCTOBER.

From falling leaf to falling leaf,

How strange it was, through all the year, In all its joy and all its grief,

You did not know I loved you dear; Through all the winter-time and spring, You smiled and watched me come and go, Through all the summer blossoming,

How strange it was you did not know

Your face shone from my earth and sky,
Your voice was in my heart always,
Days were as dreams when you were by,
And nights of dreaming linked the day;
In my great joy I craved so much,

My life lay trembling at your hand,
I prayed you for one magic touch,
How strange you did not understand!

From leaf to leaf, the trees are bare,
The autumn wind is cold and stern,
And outlined in the clear sharp air,

Lies a new world for me to learn;
Stranger than all, dear friend, to-day,

You take my hand and do not know A thousand years have passed away, Since last year-when I loved you so.

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

It is not often that one can trace the gradual evolution of a poetic individuality so clearly as in the case of Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts. He has written five books of verse: the first almost entirely academic and conventional; the second still academic, but with traces of personal feeling and observation breaking through; the third mature and, so to speak, real, but scarcely individual; the fourth and fifth entirely disencumbered of imitation and convention, expressing in simple, straightforward personal accents a marked intellectual individuality. Mr. Roberts's talent has ripened slowly, bnt it has ripened to some purpose. In Orion, and other Poems (1880), we read the college exercise on every page. Several of the poems are distinctly able. If there was a "Newdigate" at Mr. Roberts's university, I am sure he deserved it, and trust he won it. In Orion, Ariadne, and Memnon we have the usual classical themes treated in the usual romantic fashion. Lancelot and the Four Queens is a laboured and formless ballad; the Ode to Drowsihead and Ode to Night are the statutory imitations of Keats; and in the Ballades and Rondeaus we see nothing but a young poet toying with his tools. Everything, as he himself says rather prettily, in a dedication to his father, has to do with

Alien matters in distant regions

Wrought in the youth of the centuries.

Six years later comes his second volume, In Divers Tones. Still he deals largely in classical themes-Actaon, The Pipes of Pan, Off Pelorus, &c.-but Acteon is written in strong and supple blank verse, and The Pipes of Pan in elegiacs which are not without an accent of their own. Furthermore, he has a fervid patriotic apostrophe to Canada, with the usual love-songs and some well-observed sonnets of country life.

These sonnets he reprints, with a number of others tuned to the same key, in his third book, Songs of the Common Day (1893). By this time he has learnt to draw his inspiration direct from nature, not from books. His verse begins to smack of the soil. The greater part of it is characteristically Canadian, and several pieces are notably vivid and vigorous. The most memorable, I think, are The Silver Thaw and two ballads of rustic life, A Christmas-Eve Courtin' and The Wood Frolic. A poem entitled Canadian Streams shows, when compared with the address to Canada in the earlier volume, a great advance in imaginative vision and distinction of style-in all that makes the difference between poetry and rhetoric. In several pieces, too—notably in A Song of Growth—we find unmistakable indications of that strong philosophical faculty which distinguishes Mr. Roberts's later work.

It is in The Book of the Native (1896) that his full individuality first declares itself. New York Nocturnes (1898) places some admirable work to his credit, but does not reveal his talent in a new light.

A deep and intimate love of nature and a vivid metaphysical imagination are, I conceive, Mr. Roberts's master qualities. He has an equally keen eye for sublunary and for translunary things: for the dewdrop and for the universe it mirrors. There is something of Thoreau in Mr. Roberts's endowment; something too, I think, of Robert Louis Stevenson; but withal his note is original. He