Charles Mair, author of _Dreamland and Other Poems_, and _Tecumseh: A Drama_, is the authority for the belief that Pauline Johnson went through an experience of romantic love which, in its joy, gave wings of ecstasy and a warm emotional coloring to her nature-poetry, but which, when her love suffered a defeat that meant a spiritual cataclysm for her, drew from her the most poignant expression of yearning for union with Immortal Love. The important truth is that whichever emotion she expresses, she remains unequalled as a lyrist of the ecstasy and the pathos of romantic love. But her poems of the ecstasy of love are never merely the expression of subjective emotions. They also have an idyllic or nature setting which so colors her nature-poetry itself with the passion of love as to distinguish it, both as nature-poetry and as love poetry, from anything else of the kind in Canadian Literature. The ecstasy is somewhat subdued in _Idlers_; but is passionate and transporting, warmly colored with the light and tints of Nature, and set to verbal music in perfect harmony with the emotion and the nature-setting in _Wave-won_. The fact of the defeat of love, in Pauline Johnson’s case, may be observed in her _Overlooked_, a poem which is notable for the invention on her part of a metaphor that, for originality and beauty, is worthy of the Greek idyllists or of Catullus, namely:— O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise. At length Pauline Johnson’s merely human passion of yearning for union with the mortal companion is transmuted into a spiritualized yearning—which, however, has not in it the sad wistfulness of the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall—for union with Immortal Love. Defeat of romantic love in Pauline Johnson’s case passed, first, into renouncement, and, at last, into resignation and the total giving of self to Immortal Love, as in _Brier_— Because, dear Christ, your tender, wounded arm Bends back the brier that edges life’s long way, That no hurt comes to heart, to soul no harm, I do not feel the thorn so much to-day. Because I never knew your care to tire, Your hand to weary guiding me aright, Because you walk before and crush the brier, It does not pierce my feet so much to-night. Because so often you have hearkened to My selfish prayers, I ask but one thing now, That these harsh hands of mine add not unto The crown of thorns upon your bleeding brow. Pauline Johnson possessed extraordinary, if not quite unique, gifts as a story-telling balladist. Examples of her art in this species are her compelling story of Indian love and revenge, _Ojistoh_, her melodramatic Indian tale, _The Cattle Thief_, and her _Wolverine_, a poem of Western _chevalerie_, in which species, however, she does not rank with Isabella Valancy Crawford.