Flooding the silence in a silvern dream. • • • • Low flutes the lake along the lustrous sedge. • • • • But dawns and sunsets fell on mute dead faces. • • • • Belled with bees, a pollened bevy. • • • • Out of the murmurous moods of your multitudinous mind. • • • • Dim mists of darkness rise from marsh and mere. • • • • The waking world leaps to the day’s desire. • • • • The harmonies that float and melt afar. • • • • Deep-sounding and surgent, the armies of storm sweep by. • • • • None of Campbell’s contemporaries surpassed him in painting a simple but vivid _genre_ picture, and enhancing it with verbal melody, as he does, for instance, in his _Canadian Folksong_, beginning:— The doors are shut, the windows fast; Outside the gust is driving past, Outside the shivering ivy clings, While on the hob the kettle sings; ‘Margery, Margery, make the tea,’ Singeth the kettle merrily. As a poet of humane patriotism, which has regard for international or world relations, and which is not mere ‘drum and trumpet’ patriotism, Campbell stands in a class by himself. He had a Keltic love of place or home. It was a passion with him, but the passion embraced the Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that his patriotic poetry contains a large element of the ideal of Anglo-Saxon unity and of the imperialistic destiny of the British peoples. Thus we find him singing with equal warmth of Scotland, the homeland of his ancestors (as in _The World-Mother_), of England (as in his _To England_), of the United States (as in his _To the United States_), and of Canada, his homeland (as in _Canada_.) A sincere and profound sense and love of brotherhood is the key-note of his patriotic poetry. There is no magniloquent bombast in it, whereas it must be admitted that Roberts’ _Canada_ and his _Ode to the Confederacy_ have at least an air of pomp of words which sound like mere magniloquence or bombast. But there is in Campbell’s _Canada_ a sincere sense of history, of historical background and heroic origins, as well as of a people whom the vastness of their habitat should impel to a great and noble destiny. Besides, Campbell sings of the homeland in simple octameter couplets, the very simplicity of which impresses the spirit with a deep sense of truth and reality. The poem, with a slight change or two for choral singing would, if set to dignified and sonorous music, be fitted to be an inspiring and inspiriting National Hymn. It is a colorful, lyrical poem, a Song, suffused with the qualities of the Canadian spirit and the beauties of the Canadian habitat. We quote a few excerpts:—