It is important to appreciate the significance of Pauline Johnson’s sixteen years of travelling over Canada, the United States, and England, as a reciter and dramatic reader. Possibly they reduced the amount of her poetic output. But there are no evidences in _Flint and Feather_ that the experiences gained during these years diminished or increased her powers of poetic vision or craftsmanship. Pauline Johnson was self-deceived when, in a letter, she expressed her belief that the fugitive verses published in _Flint and Feather_, pages 135-156, surpass her poems in _The White Wampum_ and in _Canadian Born_. ‘My later fugitive verse,’ she declared, ‘is, of course, my best work, as it is more mature.’ There are only fifteen of these so-called fugitive poems; but imaginative, musical, and tender as they are, notably _In Grey Days_, _Autumn’s Orchestra_, _The Trail to Lillooet_, _The Lifting of the Mist_, _The King’s Consort_, and _Day Dawn_, they are all in the early manner of the poet. They are lovely and winning poems, pervaded with seductive music, tone-color pictures of nature and of life, tinged with a tender pathos. But they show no advance in technique, verbal music, imagery, or emotional nuance—no lately acquired powers to express rhythmic ecstasy with a newer and more musical lilt than obtains in _The Song My Paddle Sings_ (1892); or to paint with more suggestive impressionism a nature picture full of color, half-lights, or mystery, or more finely to etch a verbal portrait than she has done in _Erie Waters_, _Marshlands_, _Shadow River_, and _Joe_; or to catch and envisage a mood or emotional nuance with subtler spirituality than she accomplished in _The Camper_, _Lady Lorgnette_, _Lullaby of the Iroquois_, _Prairie Greyhounds_, _Lady Icicle_, and _The Prodigal_. All these poems, whose titles have just been quoted, were composed in the decade from 1892 to 1902, and belong to Pauline Johnson’s first two volumes which together contained sixty-seven poems of indubitable lyric and imaginative quality. Of the poems composed by Pauline Johnson in the decade from 1902 to 1912, only twenty-three were deemed by the poet worthy to stand beside her poems from _The White Wampum_ and in _Canadian Born_ which, with the later twenty-three, form the contents of the original edition of _Flint and Feather_. Five posthumously published poems were added to the later editions.