Marjorie Pickthall was the first to give the Canadian public sweet draughts of a new poetic wine of life. She engaged the attention of the Canadian public with the same immediacy and delight as the early lyrics of Tennyson and Swinburne captivated the English lovers of poetry. Set for the most part to a new or, so far as Canada was concerned, a strange music of trochaic, anapaestic, and syncopated metres and rhythms, rich in vowel-harmonies and the tone-color of consonance, assonance, and exquisite alliteration, her songs changed the world about her into an earthly paradise. At first Marjorie Pickthall arrested attention as a young unknown poet singing shyly from a corner in a daily newspaper or magazine, but singing with a rare beauty of imagery and of color from Nature, and with a fresh and dulcet verbal melody, heard as overtones above the more plashing, plangent rhythms of Service and his colleagues. It seemed as if Pan had come again to earth, so idyllic was the Nature-beauty and so simple and dulcet was the melody of her poetry, as in, for instance, _The Little Fauns to Proserpine_, daintily suggestive of their shadowy figures:— Browner than the hazel-husk, swifter than the wind, Though you turn from heath and hill, we are hard behind, Singing, ‘Ere the sorrows rise, ere the gates unclose, Bind above your wistful eyes the memory of the rose.’ • • • • Now the vintage feast is done, now the melons glow Gold along the raftered thatch beneath a thread of snow. Dian’s bugle bids the dawn sweep the upland clear, Where we snared the silken fawn, where we ran the deer. Through the dark reeds wet with rain, past the singing foam Went the light-foot Mysian maids, calling Hylas home. Syrinx felt the silver sprite fold her at her need. Hear, ere yet you say farewell, the wind along the reed. There was no appeal on the part of Service and the other Vaudevillians to the spirit, to the religious imagination. It was inevitable, then, that the Canadian public—and the world—should be arrested by the spiritual beauty, tenderness, wistfulness, and the engaging music of such a poem as Marjorie Pickthall’s _Mary Shepherdess_, the following three stanzas of which illustrate how the thought is ‘woven and rhymed of light’:— When the heron’s in the high wood and the last long furrow’s sown, With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown, Comes Mary, Mary Shepherdess, a-seeking for her own. Saint James he calls the righteous fold, Saint John he calls the kind, Saint Peter seeks the valiant men all to loose or bind, But Mary seeks the little souls that are so hard to find, All the little sighing souls born of dust’s despair, They who fed on bitter bread when the world was bare, Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.