What image of a star-lit night is left behind by this jumble of highsounding words! The imagination comes to a full stop at these impossible comparisons, express and implied. What is meant by the chords of the night being tense? Can any one picture the strings of a lyre strung by the fingers of silence ere sound had birth? What image is awakened? It is, perhaps, hypercritical to object that the poet has made alien echoes in the distance attributes of the dark, like its tenseness. The epithet shrivelled may, possibly, be passed over, because it may express the idea which the poet had in his mind, whatever that may be. The meaning given to the word wizened by dictionaries is thin and dried. No careful writer, much less a poet of refined taste, would have forgotten its particular application, and dared to introduce into the imposing picture which he

had in hand the wizened face of an old woman. When fancy takes such flights as these it soars beyond the possibility of artistic effect.

Most readers will prefer such poems as "Unabsolved," because they deal with life and possess some strength of dramatic interest. Yet the pleasure will be greatly marred by their highsoundingness, and by the lack of deli

cacy in the expression of sentiments in themselves original and interesting. In these days of liberal thought, a poet even may go a long way in satirizing the clergy without giving offense. But the reader of poetry is disposed to be very manly, and will iteration of an unfriendly sentiment, find his pleasure destroyed by the where it is spoken gratuitously and not addressed to an offensive individual suffering poetic justice.

The same unrefined taste shows itwhich has won the unstinted applause self in his poem entitled "The Mother," of a Chicago newspaper. It is a poem intense human interest-a mother's dealing with a subject of the most love for her first-born. It is too long for reproduction in full. These are the opening stanzas:

It was April, blossoming spring,
They buried me when the birds did sing ;
Earth, in clammy wedging earth,
They banked my bed with a black, damp girth.
Under the damp and under the mould,
I kenned my breasts were clammy and cold.

Out from the red beams, slanting and bright,

I kenned my cheeks were sunken and white.
I was a dream, and the world was a dream,
And yet I kenned all things that seem.
I was a dream, and the world was a dream,
But you cannot bury a red sunbeam.

She narrates further that, lying “stark and white," she knew the changes of seasons, the alternation of day and night, the whispering wind and the blossoming flowers:

Though they had buried me dark and low,
My soul with the season's seemed to grow.

There is, then, a retrogression in time:
I was a bride in my sickness sore;
I was a bride nine months and more,

when death came. "But under the sod," she dreamed of her baby; his rest was broken in wailings on her "dead breast." She could not sleep in her "cold earth bed," and rose from

her "damp earth bed," "rosy and warm," with the dreams of her child. I felt my breasts swell under my shroud! Then stole past the "graveyard wall," passed the streets to "my husband's home," climbed the chamber stairs amid the sound of sleeping persons, Like waves that break on the shores of death, paused a moment at the door, Then stole like a moon ray over the floor,

and, behold, her infant lay on "a stranger arm." Crooning to the child, Crooning to the child, she carries him back to her bed, “banked with a blossoming girth," and "nestling him soft to her throbbing breast," "steals to her long, long rest," and lies with him

Under the flowers

That sun winds rock through the billowy hours

With the night-airs that steal from the murmuring sea,

Bringing sweet peace o my baby and me.

This wanton repetition of coarse suggestions of the charnel-house is not compensated by the mawkish sentiment of the poem, or by the questionable beauty of its scenery. Poetry cannot tolerate the disagreeable, except in rare instances. Tennyson, reflecting on the short span of human life, produces a rare effect of art when he says:

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

That name the underlying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

But he does not stay to dig up the grave and spread before us its shocking contents; he does not permit us to linger until our minds seize the painful suggestions of the place. There is scarcely a line of "The Mother" in which the horror is not renewed. It must be a sluggish imagination which, in the time of these eighty or ninety lines, does not grow to a full realization of this dreadful scene. It is no answer to say that the poem is to be taken in a spiritual sense, for that is

impossible, and it cannot have been the writer's intention, else why the repetition of material suggestions which force the mind into activity? If it was sought to intensify the impression of a mother's love by naming the physical conditions which attend it, it is just to say that, aside from the suggestions of the grave, the poem would still have been offensive. The physical conditions of maternity are regarded with so great reserve and delicacy that only the most veiled allusions may be made to them. be made to them. Nor is it an answer to say that the disagreeableness of the poem is harmonized by such poetic expressions as, “you cannot bury a red sunbeam," or, "you cannot bury a mother in spring." Rather, the pain of the reader is increased by the violent contrast of feeling, by the effort to hold together images so opposite in their suggestions as those presented by this poem.

If the foregoing remarks be just, and they are tendered in a spirit of perfect fairness, Canadian poetry is devoid of life and interest. It is scarcely likely that these faults are altogether due to false principles of art. Want of moral enthusiasm, of the inspiring energy of new ideas and large hopes of human progress, leaves men of talent no other course than to seek a false brilliancy in the trickery of exaggerated description and strained sentiment. Scott and Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth were full of the new wine of the French Revolution, and spoke as their hearts burned. Tennyson reflected the minds of men who had seen the hopes of their father's fail. Education has been slow to lift up the masses; Cobden did not foresee the squalor of industrialism; the ballot-box has not brought perfect freedom, nor lifted the burden of militarism. It may be that in these later days human enthusiasm has flickered out. If so, we cannot expect great poets till there be a rekindling of new ideas and new hopes of humanity.

Canadians are so eager for a na

"M

AJOR MACKENZIE, will you take down Miss Broadhurst?" The Major bowed, and Miss Broadhurst inclined her head with the prettiest smile in the world.

"I wondered," said she, "if I was to be inflicted upon you, or upon that strange-looking gentleman with the glasses."

"It's no infliction, I'm sure. I was just hoping that

"Now don't perjure yourself, Major Mackenzie," said the girl.

They were standing at the bay window of a sitting room in the "Dorset," a little private hotel, where at present Mr. Graham (of James Graham & Bennet, importers, of the city) was entertaining a small houseparty in the hot August days. It overlooks one of those quiet little bays, with St. George's Channel on the horizon; and Major Mackenzie always declared that he liked the "Dorset" the best of any place on earth. It is a question if he would have said so, had Ethel Broadhurst not been there; but the Major was a backward wooer and, so far, Ethel knew nothing of the ocean of affection that the Major held shut up in his turbulent heart.

"Who is that lady who has just come in? Do you know her?"

The Major looked to the door, and groaned inwardly. Yes, I know her. It's

66

Mrs. Holler and that's Mr. Holler coming in now," said he.

"She looks as if she might be clever, doesn't she?

Yes, she might be !" said the Major, dejectedly. "I don't know her as well as my friend Brock does. She used to patronize him, and Brock had to put up with it, for Holler's firm (he's a lawyer) had a good deal to do with Brock, and he wanted to stand in well. But one day she asked Billy to take Mrs. Tabley for a drive (Mrs. Tabley takes fits, or something like that), and Billy said he wasn't going to be footman to an epileptic, infirmary; and then there was a battle. To tell the truth, Mrs. Holler thinks I am her legitimate prey, because I amı chummy with Brock."

it?"

That's rather hard on you, isn't

A long silence ensued, the Major looking out on the water, where the horizon was a mass of blue and greygold.

"A penny for your thoughts, Major Mackenzie !"

"I was thinking of a question you once asked me when I used to know you. You were about five years old, and I-well, I was correspondingly older-just after I got my commission -and you asked, before about a dozen people, Mr. 'Kenzie, what makes your nose red ?'"

"Oh, I never said such a thing, surely!" cried Miss Broadhurst.

"I can feel my blushes yet. But, to do me justice, I think it was only sunburn."

Will you let me atone now for the follies of my childhood?"

"Oh, Miss Ethel, I wouldn't be so exacting. But there's the bell!"

The "Dorset " prided itself upon its style; and Mr. Graham presided at the head and Mrs. Graham at the foot of a table, which was just like their own mahogany, there being no strangers.

Mrs. Holler's mood was a very perverse one, and Mackenzie kept a discreet silence lest she should fix upon him, and compel him to widen the breach that already existed between them.

During a spirited conversation at the other end of the table, which rendered it difficult for any one not concerned to hear, Mrs. Holler leaned over and said,

"Did you see your friend Mr. Barker, when you were at Malta, Major Mackenzie ?"

"Yes, Mrs. Holler."

"Does he drink as much as ever?" "I never observed that he drank," said the Major, mildly.

"Your powers of observation cannot be acute," retorted Mrs. Holler, with a good deal of acerbity.

"I never noticed any particular lack in myself."

"People rarely do!" was her re

joinder; after which silence fell on the group.

As they left the dining-room, Ethel Broadhurst looked at the Major, with a mischievous smile: "You and aunt don't get on, do you?"

"Aunt!" quoth the amazed Major. "Yes, didn't you know that? Think of all the things you said of my aunt, and to me, too!"

The Major reddened. "Well, I didn't tell any lies!" he added, deliberately. 'You should have told-"

"Oh, don't mention it! Aunt Holler's first husband was my father's brother. He died." Mackenzie laughed; for her words implied cause and effect. "But don't worry, Major. Wait till she rows me some day, and then listen to what I shall say about her. I am a regular vixen!"

"Nobody would judge so to look at you."

"But I am!" I shall lead some poor man a dog's life,-maybe," she added, after a pause.

Mayn't I be the dog?" said the Major, with a sudden change of tone, which caused Ethel to look up.

"I'm-not-sure that you wantthat you'd like to be chained up, would you?" she said, with a queer little smile. "But you're not serious?" she added quickly.

But a woman would not have needed to look twice at his eyes to know that he was serious; and Ethel Broadhurst was a woman.

By the strange perversity of man and womankind, no word further was spoken for three days, and nothing had transpired between Mrs. Holler and the Major, save a few skirmishes, in which the Major used defensive tactics. On Saturday the schoonerraces had been held, and competition had been keen. Mr. Holler had not been fortunate in his selection of the winner, and, consequently, Mrs. Holler was not in the best of sunny humours; she was a true barometer of her devoted husband's moods.