I marked the slow withdrawal of the year, Out on the hills the scarlet maple shone— The glad, first herald of triumphal dawn. A robin’s song fell through the silence—clear As long ago it rang when June was here. Then, suddenly, a few grey clouds were drawn Across the sky; and all the song was gone, And all the gold was quick to disappear. That day the sun seemed loth to come again; And all day long the low wind spoke of rain, Far-off, beyond the hills; and moaned, like one Wounded, among the pines; as though the Earth, Knowing some giant grief had come to birth, Had wearied of the Summer and the Sun. A rare spirit and exquisite craftsman, as a poet, is Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe. He was born in Ireland in 1861. He is Keltic through and through; and because he is Keltic in his reactions to the universe, in his perceptions of spiritual meanings in all things, he divines God in men and God in Nature, or God _as_ man and God as Nature—spiritual presences everywhere. In a word, Albert E. S. Smythe exemplifies in his genius and art, as notably and profoundly as Lampman in his, but in a different way, what Wordsworth called _natural piety_. Smythe’s spiritual perceptions of divinity everywhere rise to a refined mysticism which he expresses with a ‘white beauty’ in exquisitely finished verse. As contrasted with other Canadian mystical poets Smythe is the poet of the _Cosmic_ Spirit and Beauty. In 1891 he published _Poems; Grave and Gay_, and in 1923, _The Garden of the Sun_. A sonnet (_The Seasons of the Gods_) and a lyric (_Anastasis_) from the second volume suffice to disclose his qualities in his role as the poet of the Cosmic Spirit and Beauty. As a sonneteer, Smythe is not surpassed by any of his older or younger contemporaries. _The Seasons of the Gods_ is lofty in conception, noble in thought, rich in naturalistic imagery, dulcet in verbal melody, and perfect in formal artistry. It is music of a soul ‘in tune with the Infinite’:— I sat with May upon a midnight hill Wrapped in a dusk of unremembered years And thought on buried April—on the tears And shrouds of March, and Youth’s dead daffodil All withered on a Mound of Spring. And still The earth moved sweetly in her sleep, the Spheres Wrought peace about her path, and for her ears Climbed the high music of their blended will. The God who dreamed the Earth, as I this frame That makes me thrall to death and coward of birth— Dreamed He not March below some vanished Moon— Under an earlier Heaven’s auroral flame The cosmic April flowering into mirth Of May and joy of Universal June? With what lyrical eloquence, subdued, yet direct and compelling, Smythe calls the soul, in pure poetry, to achieve its spiritual destiny, in this lyric, simple in diction and structure, but sublimated, in thought:—