Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden, Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain, Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart And loses a gold kernel to the mould, So the old world, hanging long in the sun, And deep enriched with effort and with love, Shall, in motions of maturity, Wither and part, and the kernel of it all Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes Where the appearance, throated like a bird, Winged with fire and bodied all with passion, Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy. All through this elegiac monody there is a singularly sweet humanity and yet in it are heard the constant overtones of ‘the soul’s inherent high magnificence,’ and the whole is suffused or informed with the color of Canadian Nature and character and life. So that the poem is a novel and important contribution to the elegiac monody in English. In another style and with another but winning effect upon the heart and the imagination, is William Edward Marshall’s monody _Brookfield_. It is a poem of forty-five stanzas in the Spenserian form. Structurally viewed, however, his _Brookfield_ is considerably an achievement in that form. Its theme is the heart and mind of a simple man, a friend of the poet, who taught the poet to love communion with the simple creatures and the life of Nature, and to observe in Nature, not the garment, but the very spiritual presence of God. There is no metaphysic of Nature in _Brookfield_. There is but the apprehension of divinity in the little wild creatures and in the streams and hills, and in the mists, and in all the varied life of the universal mother. Marshall’s master was Keats, and while _Brookfield_ cannot critically be called an example of sensuous impressionism, yet it is warmly colored with pigmentation from the palette of Nature. But the loveliest strands running through the warp and woof of the poem are those of love and the heavenly vision. The sweet, gentle, even tender, Nature-quality as well as the spiritual note in the poem, may be apprehended from the following stanza:— Ah, he was richly dowered of the earth! The grain of sand, the daisy in the sod, Awoke his heart; and early he went forth, Through field and wood, with young eyes all abroad; And saw the nesting birds and beck and nod Of little creatures running wild and free, (Which know not that they know, yet are of God) And kept his youth, and grew in sympathy, And loved his fellows more, and had love’s victory.