"They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching, They have soaked you in convention through and through; {287} They have put you in a showcase; you're a credit to their teaching-- But can't you hear the wild?--it's calling you. Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us; Let us journey to a lonely land I know. There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, And the wild is calling, calling ... let us go." In _The Law of the Yukon_ we find: "This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain; 'Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane; Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore; Send me men girt for the combat,--men who are grit to the core; Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones; Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons; Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat; But the others, the misfits, the failures,--I trample under my feet. * * * * * * * * "'I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods; Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods. Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first, Visioning campfires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn.' * * * * * * * * "This is the law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive; Dissolute, damned, and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, This is the law of Will of the Yukon,--Lo, how she makes it plain!" Robert Service has many moods, and in the tender little lyric _Unforgotten_ he dramatises the way in which one's real life lies in his consciousness rather than enchained with the bodily presence: "I know a garden where the lilies gleam, And one who lingers in the sunshine there; She is than white-stoled lily far more fair. And oh, her eyes are heaven-lit with dream. {288} "I know a garret, cold and dark and drear, And one who toils and toils with tireless pen, Until his brave, sad eyes grow weary--then He seeks the stars, pale, silent as a seer. "And ah, it's strange, for desolate and dim Between these two there rolls an ocean wide; Yet he is in the garden by her side And she is in the garret there with him." One of the wonderful poems of Mr. Service is that of _My Madonna_. The artist "haled" him "a woman from the street" for his model; he painted her: "I painted her as she might have been If the Worst had been the Best," and she "laughed at the picture and went away," but a connoisseur came and exclaimed: "'Tis Mary, the Mother of God." "So I painted a halo round her hair, And I sold her, and took my fee, And she hangs in the church of Saint Hilaire, Where you and all may see." [Illustration: Mount Robson, at a Distance of Ten Miles]