All the English poets mentioned were, however, not formative influences. At best what seems imitations of the manner of Gray, Tennyson, Rossetti, Keats, Swinburne are but recrudescences, quite unconscious and original, in Scott’s poetry. Scott is a nature-colorist, or impressionist, verbal musician and metrist, romanticist, and philosophical interpreter of Nature and Life on his own account. The real formative influences in Scott’s genius and art were the climate, atmosphere, seasons, and the color and drama of varied Nature and Humanity, of Canada; his compatriot poet of Nature, Lampman, and perhaps Carman, and these three English poets, Browning, Arnold and Meredith; and, finally, his appreciation and knowledge of the technic of music and painting. Considering his qualities as a verbal musician and metrist, we may note that while Scott employs all the technical artifices of other Canadian and English poets, such as vowel-melody and harmony, alliteration and consonantal changes, beautiful measures and rhythms, he differs from his compatriot poets by informing, as did Browning, the substance of his poetry with an intimate use of the technical language of music, allusions to musical literature, and the aesthetic values of music. The texts of his poems show that he is acquainted technically with the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Grieg, such romantic moderns as Raff and MacDowell and such ultra-moderns as Debussy and Ravel. To anyone who has heard Beethoven’s Fifth (C-minor) Symphony, how arresting and emotionally impressive is the allusion to the principal motive of that great work, in these lines from Scott’s _The Fragment of a Letter_!— Then quick upon the dark, like knocks of fate, There fell three axe-strokes, and then clear, elate Came back the echoes true to tune and time, Three axe-strokes—rhythmed and matched in rhyme. Again: it is not poetical pedantry on Scott’s part when, in his elegiac monody _On the Death of Claude Debussy_, he rhapsodizes the forms, content, properties, color, and musical structure—‘the mood pictures’—of Debussy’s opera _Pellèas et Mélisande_, his orchestral prelude _L’Après-midi d’un Faune_, and his orchestral sketches _La Mer_. No musical journalist or critic, writing in prose, has done this so summarily and with such vividness and veracity as Scott has accomplished it in twenty-five lines of trimeter and tetrameter unrhymed iambics and trochaics. It is for the sake of illumination and the substance of true poetry that Scott thus finely incorporates his knowledge of music into the text of his poetry. And, as Browning made compelling use of the technical language and meanings of musical structure, notably in his _Abt Vogler_, so, in the Debussy monody, Scott twice finely affects the spirit and illuminates the substance of his poem with such recondite musical technology as:—