essences. He lives, in short, in a Palace of Art, with little or no outlook upon the material world. But it is a palace of all that is exquisite in art, and, shut in though it be, there is nothing sickly or stifling in its atmosphere. If there are no windows in the frescoed walls, at least there are skylights in the dome, through which the stars shine large and clear.

I.

As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
As gossips whisper of a trinket's worth

Spied by the death-bed's flickering candle-gloom;
As in the crevices of Cæsar's tomb

The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:

So in this great disaster of our birth
We can be happy, and forget our doom.
For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy
Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth,
And evening gently woos us to employ
Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth;
Till from that summer's trance we wake, to find
Despair before us, vanity behind.

II.

Sleep hath composed the anguish of my brain,
And ere the dawn I will arise and pray.
Strengthen me, Heaven, and attune my lay
Unto my better angel's clear refrain.

For I can hear him in the night again,

The breathless night, snow-smothered, happy, grey,

With premonition of the jocund day,

Singing a quiet carol to my pain.

Slowly, saith he, the April buds are growing

In the chill core of twigs all leafless now;

Gently, beneath the weight of last night's snowing,

Patient of winter's hand, the branches bow.

Each buried seed lacks light as much as thou.

Wait for the spring, brave heart; there is no knowing.

III.

What riches have you that you deem me poor,
Or what large comfort that you call me sad?
Tell me what makes you so exceeding glad :
Is your earth happy or your heaven sure?
I hope for heaven, since the stars endure
And bring such tidings as our fathers had.
I know no deeper doubt to make me mad,
I need no brighter love to keep me pure.
To me the faiths of old are daily bread;
I bless their hope, I bless their will to save,
And my deep heart still meaneth what they said.
It makes me happy that the soul is brave,
And, being so much kinsman to the dead,
I walk contented to the peopled grave.

IV.

In my deep heart these chimes would still have rung

To toll your passing, had you not been dead ;
For time a sadder mask than death may spread

Over the face that ever should be young.
The bough that falls with all its trophies hung
Falls not too soon, but lays its flower-crowned head
Most royal in the dust, with no leaf shed
Unhallowed or unchiselled or unsung.

And though the after world will never hear
The happy name of one so gently true,
Nor chronicles write large this fatal year,
Yet we who loved you, though we be but few,
Keep you in whatsoe'er is good, and rear
In our weak virtues monuments to you.

DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT

WHY has Canada contributed so much, Australia so little, to the poetry of Greater Britain? This question is brought home to me, not for the first time, by the chance which places the poems of Mr. Duncan Campbell Scott in my hands, immediately after I have been vainly searching for even a single poet to represent Australia in these pages. Two or three clever, even brilliant, versifiers have won no small popularity among the public of the island continent. They write spirited narratives, stirring ballads, excellent "poems for recitation." Their descriptions of life and sport in the bush are often of great merit, full of Bret Harte-like pathos and human interest. They will sing you the fabulous exploits of a racehorse or of a bushranger with admirable vigour. They have a very pretty touch at a sentimental character-sketch. But the literary note, the note of style, dignity, rhythmical refinement and verbal beauty, is wanting in all the Australian verse that has come in my way. I ask myself in vain why this should be. I can aver of my own knowledge that Australian nature and Australian life abound in all the elements that go to the making of poetry. A man of the talent of Mr. Campbell Scott, for instance, would find under the Southern Cross ample material for his strong and delicate art. Why has Canada three or four such men, and

Australia, so far as I can discover, not one? Perhaps when a great Australian poet shall, in the fulness of time, arise, we may be able to discern why his coming has been delayed so long.

Meanwhile, it is evident that Canada has a certain advantage, for poetical purposes, in the greater variety of her climate. She has two extremes of temperature, Australia only one. The process of the seasons is as strongly marked in Canada as in any region of the planet ; in Australia it is much less emphasised. The cyclic drama of life and death, then, comes home more vividly to the Canadian than to the Australian observer, and perhaps stimulates more powerfully both his observation and his imagination.

In Mr. Campbell Scott both qualities are present in liberal measure. He is above everything a poet of climate and atmosphere, employing with a nimble, graphic touch the clear, pure, transparent colours of a richly-furnished palette. He leaves unrecorded no single phase in the pageant of the northern year, from the odorous heat of June to the ice-bound silence of December. His work abounds in magically luminous phrases and stanzas. Here are two detached quatrains from a poem entitled The Voice and the Dusk:

The slender moon and one pale star,
A rose-leaf and a silver bee
From some god's garden blown afar,
Go down the gold deep tranquilly.

A thrush is hidden in a maze

Of cedar buds and tamarac bloom,
He throws his rapid flexile phrase,
A flash of emeralds in the gloom.

There is a rare intensity of imaginative vision in these two