Finally: Pauline Johnson is certainly not surpassed, if equalled, by any other Canadian lyrist as an inventor of beautiful color epithets and of picturesque, vivid, and compelling metaphors. They are to be found everywhere in her poetry. Consider these as examples—‘Russet needles as censers swing to an altar,’ ‘The sea-weeds cling with flesh-like fingers,’ ‘Beaten gold that clung like coils of kisses love inlaid,’ ‘The brownish hills with needles green and gold,’ ‘O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise,’ ‘Swept beneath a shore of shade, beneath a velvet moon,’ ‘Like net work threads of fire,’ and this, Purple her eyes as the mists that dream At the edge of some laggard, sun-drowned stream and many more as novel, colorful, musical, veracious and compelling. As a woman Pauline Johnson was a rare and beautiful spirit. As a poet she was of all Canadian poets the most pervasively true to her Canadian origin and habitat. She is not to be given always the status of Lampman and Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott, yet to her unquestionably belongs a place beside these Canadian singers. Her poetry had a magic of music and a color of leafy lawns and lovely grey-eyed and tawny dusks and clear ecstatic morns, which were all her own. She was indeed a ‘Mohawk Warbler,’ and her songs are Free and artless as the avian lays Heard in Canadian woods on April days. * * * * * The quotations in this chapter from Pauline Johnson’s poems are from _Flint and Feather_, by E. Pauline Johnson, (Musson Book Co., Limited: Toronto). CHAPTER XIII Parker _and_ Scott (F. G.) PARKER AS A SONNETEER OF SPIRITUAL LOVE—ORIGIN AND THEME OF A LOVER’S DIARY—MUSICAL AND COLORFUL LYRICAL VERSE—SCOTT’S POETRY A REFLECTION OF HIS PERSONALITY—DISTINGUISHED AS THE ‘POET OF THE SPIRIT’—CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. It was as a poet, not as a creator of historical romances, that Sir Gilbert Parker first appeared as a man of letters and first appealed to the literary public. As a poet he was appreciated in Australia and in England, but not in Canada. That as a poet he has been unknown and unappreciated in his homeland, Canada, is due to the fact that he was expatriate when he published his two volumes of poems, the second of which was ‘privately printed,’ and that his greater reputation as a novelist, particularly of old romantic Canada, made him known in the Dominion exclusively as a writer of fiction. Sir Gilbert Parker, however, ranks high as a sonneteer of spiritual love, and as lyrist in _genre_ verse which has attained special reputation, particularly as texts of songs for _salon_ and recital repertory.