I know a mountain thrilling to the stars, Peerless and pure, and pinnacled with snow; Glimpsing the golden dawn o’er coral bars, Flaunting the vanished sunset’s garnet glow; Proudly patrician, passionless, serene; Soaring in silvered steeps where cloud-surfs break; Virgin and vestal—oh, a very Queen! And at her feet there dreams a quiet lake. . . . In that poem Service has given us an arresting and memorable picture of pure beauty in Nature. It is beautiful and unforgettable because it has poetic _Style_. Stead and the other members of the Vaudeville School, with the exception at times of Service when at his best, lacked genius for style in verse, without which verse, whether its subject or theme be low or high, realistic or idealistic, cannot rise to the dignity of poetry. Service, Stead, and the rest are never authentic Realists. They could not avoid the melodramatic in the matter of their verse and the plangent and vivid in its technique. Always they deliberately set out to assault the senses and the sensibilities. Kipling could be realistic and by virtue of his style rise to the dignity of poetry. But for the lack of style, the hectic realism of Service and Stead never rises above the crudely melodramatic or Vaudevillian. As picaresque realists they are, to quote Mr. E. B. Osborn, ‘far behind the Australian and compare very unfavorably with the minor masters of Quebec.’ Many of the most effective pieces in Service’s first volume (_Songs of a Sourdough_) were deliberate imitations of Kipling. But later he gave some promise of developing an independent manner of his own, the manner which is disclosed in _The Mountain and the Lake_, and which indubitably revealed in him innate original powers for painting the beauty and sublimity of Nature in the Arctic. Service did not hold to his own manner; and Stead and the other Vaudevillians were innately incapable of any manner of their own. At length the vogue of the Vaudeville poets passed, having in no way affected the stream of aesthetic and artistic poetry which began with the Systematic School and which flowed on, pure and undefiled, if placid and noiseless, through the poetry of the later generation and into the Restoration Period or Second Renaissance in Canadian Literature.