Scott surpasses all other Canadian poets in a genius for inventing single and double terminal rhymes, and he excels in this gift, without ever dropping to impossible or bizarre rhymes, except when the comedy of life in a subject naturally requires the use of a vulgarism as in this couplet from the Burlesca movement (VIII) of _Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme_:— But I keeps my quarter, Though—perhaps I’d orter. As ready and expert as Carman with such other musical resources as vowel-melody and harmony, assonance, consonantal tone-color and alliteration, Scott is more lyrically melodious than even Carman. Melodiousness—dulcet melody of combined vowel and consonant and rhythm—is the supreme musical quality of Scott’s poetry. Not Tennyson nor Swinburne have surpassed the melodiousness of this stanza from Scott’s _The Lover to His Lass_:— Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet, Cover her with morning, this thing of pure delight, Mantle her with midnight till a mortal cannot See her for the garments of the light and the night. Matching the melodiousness of Scott’s poetry is its inimitable ‘color-music,’ a combination of sensuous color and alliteration, which quite rivals Swinburne. Scott’s poetry indeed abounds in the most ingenious and sensuously musical alliterative lines in Canadian verse. Outstanding examples are these:— One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair. • • • • Dark with sordid passion, pale with wringing pain. • • • • Shall find amid the ferns the perfect flower. • • • • With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow. • • • • The still, translucent, turquoise-hearted tarns. • • • • Rubies, pale as dew-ponds stained with slaughter. • • • • See Aldebaran like a red rose clamber. • • • • The long, ripe rippling of the grain. • • • • Flush and form, honey and hue. • • • • Still pools of sunlight shimmering in the sea. • • • • Languorously floating by the lotus leaves. • • • • Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow. Such magical melody and color are not artifice or even art with Scott. It is all an inspiration, clear spontaneity of genius. If it were artifice or art it would be confined to mere phrases or lines; but Scott as readily and as magically fills stanzas with the same magical melody and color as in _The Voice and The Dusk_:— The slender moon and one pale star, A rose-leaf and a silver bee From some fool’s garden blown afar, Go down the gold deep tranquilly.