loves nature in detail rather than in bulk. I should not call him a great landscapist, or a chronicler of aërial pageantries. His eye is concentrated on fruits, flowers, and grasses, orchards and purling brooks-on corners of landscape rather than on mountainous or oceanic expanses. These opening stanzas of a poem entitled Afoot are characteristic of the aspect in which Nature usually presents herself to his eyes:

Comes the lure of green things growing,
Comes the call of waters flowing,-

And the wayfarer desire

Moves and wakes and would be going.

Hark the migrant hosts of June
Marching nearer noon by noon!

Hark the gossip of the grasses
Bivouacked beneath the moon!
Hark the leaves their mirth averring;
Hark the buds to blossom stirring :
Hark the hushed, exultant haste
Of the wind and world conferring!

Hark the sharp, insistent cry
Where the hawk patrols the sky!

Hark the flapping, as of banners,
Where the heron triumphs by!

Empire in the coasts of bloom
Humming cohorts now resume,-

And desire is forth to follow
Many a vagabond perfume.

Mr. Roberts is never tired of singing the "open

meadows," the "uncut hayfields,"

Where the hot scent steams and quivers,

Where the hot saps thrill and stir,

Where in leaf-cells' green pavilions

Quaint artificers confer;

Where the bobolinks are merry,

Where the beetles bask and gleam,

Where above the powdered blossoms

Powdered moth-wings poise and dream ;

Where the bead-eyed mice adventure
In the grass roots green and dun.
Life is good and love is eager

In the playground of the sun!

Admirable pieces in the same key are The Trout Brook (which all brothers of the angle should know by heart), An August Wood Road, Apple Song, The Quest of the Arbutus, and An Oblation. But Mr. Roberts does not sing of spring and summer only. Here is a winter fantasy of exquisite grace:

THE FROSTED PANE.

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leaned
Against my window-pane.

In the deep stillness of his heart convened
The ghosts of all his slain.

Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,
And fugitives of grass,-

White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,
He drew them on the glass.

In some poems, notably in The Heal-All, Mr. Roberts's note is purely Wordsworthian. In others his spirit soars at a single bound from contemplating the smaller lovelinesses of nature to dizzy heights of cosmic vision. For instance:

THE FALLING LEAVES.

Lightly He blows, and at His breath they fall,
The perishing kindreds of the leaves; they drift,
Spent flames of scarlet, gold aerial,

Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift.
Lightly He blows, and countless as the falling
Of snow by night upon a solemn sea,

The ages circle down beyond recalling,

To strew the hollows of Eternity.

He sees them drifting through the spaces dim,

And leaves and ages are as one to Him.

In Kinship and in Origins we see the poet's thought in

the act of passing from the infinitely little to the infinitely

great, or rather of demonstrating their oneness. Here, again, is a poem of purely metaphysical inspiration-perhaps Mr. Roberts's masterpiece in this key:

THE UNSLEEPING.

I soothe to unimagined sleep
The sunless bases of the deep,
And then I stir the aching tide
That gropes in its reluctant side.

I heave aloft the smoking hill :
To silent peace its throes I still.
But ever at its heart of fire
I lurk, an unassuaged desire.

I wrap me in the sightless germ
An instant or an endless term;
And still its atoms are my care,
Dispersed in ashes or in air.

I hush the comets one by one
To sleep for ages in the sun;
The sun resumes before my face
His circuit of the shores of space.

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,
They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drift across the darkened pane.

Space, in the dim predestined hour,
Shall crumble like a ruined tower.

I only, with unfaltering eye,

Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

It must not be supposed, however, that Nature and metaphysics are Mr. Roberts's sole inspirers. He has written some strong and passionate love-poetry-witness his Nocturnes of the Honeysuckle and Nocturne of Consecration-some very spirited ballads (one of which is quoted at the end of this article), and some admirably imaginative miscellaneous poems, such as At Tide Water, The Witches' Flight, and this, on

THE ATLANTIC CABLE.

This giant nerve, at whose command
The world's great pulses throb or sleep,-
It threads the undiscerned repose

Of the dark bases of the deep.

Around it settle in the calm

Fine tissues that a breath might mar,
Nor dream what fiery tidings pass,
What messages of storm and war.

Far over it, where filtered gleams
Faintly illume the mid-sea day,
Strange, pallid forms of fish or weed
In the obscure tide softly sway.

And higher, where the vagrant waves
Frequent the white, indifferent sun,
Where ride the smoke-blue hordes of rain
And the long vapors lift and run,

Passes perhaps some lonely ship

With exile hearts that homeward ache,

While far beneath is flashed a word

That soon shall bid them bleed or break.

Nowhere, however, does Mr. Roberts's talent appear more original and sympathetic than in his poems on, and for, children. The Little Field of Peace is a delicately restrained and touching elegy; but the poet's best things. in this kind are his Wake-up Song and Sleepy Man, two companion pieces which I cannot but quote entire :

A WAKE-UP SONG.

Sun's up; wind's up! Wake up, dearies!
Leave your coverlets white and downy,

June's come into the world this morning.

Wake up, Golden Head! Wake up, Brownie!

Dew on the meadow-grass, waves on the water,
Robins in the rowan tree, wondering about you!
Don't keep the buttercups so long waiting,
Don't keep the bobolinks singing without you.

Wake up, Golden Head! Wake up, Brownie!
Cat-bird wants you in the garden soon.
You and I, butterflies, bobolinks and clover,
We've a lot to do on the first of June.

SLEEPY MAN.

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary !)

He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !)

He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !)

He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)

At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !)

He comes with a murmur of dream in his wings
(Oh, weary my Dearie, so weary !)

And whispers of mermaids and wonderful things.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !)

Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane

(Oh, weary my Dearie, so weary !)

When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane,
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !)

When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary !)

To Sleepy Man's Castle by Comforting Ferry.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !)

I have said little of the peculiarly Canadian strain in Mr. Roberts's verse, for I am no naturalist, and should doubtless reveal startling depths of ignorance if I attempted to discuss the birds and flowers of transatlantic poets. Let me only say that in Mr. Roberts's later books, at any rate, there are no conventional echoes from the woods and gardens, or even from the Lakes, of England. When the time comes (and surely it has come) for a study of the