The key to the defects or limitations in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry was not her imagination but her ‘heart.’ She loved and had sympathy only or specially with all little creatures and things, with tender, frail, and helpless creatures and things; and she felt profoundly a sort of injustice in their fate, which begot in her a wistful wondering about the justice of the ways of God. She therefore inevitably impressed on her poetry her own feminine feeling for the little and helpless creatures of earth, her own sympathy with the evanescence of all the animate ‘little things’—children, flowers, moths, birds, and ‘the little stars of Duna’—that _for her_ made existence tolerable or happy. Everywhere in her verse appears her preoccupancy with the very word or with suggestions of the word ‘little.’ It is this ‘heart’ limitation that causes her to show what would seem at first sight to be a mannerism, namely, her predilection for certain substantives and epithets, as, for instance, ‘moth,’ ‘dove,’ ‘stars,’ ‘silver,’ ‘golden.’ It is not really a mannerism; but a necessity of her heart and mind. For the creatures and things her heart most loved, inevitably filled her consciousness and excluded other creatures and things. But while Marjorie Pickthall, by limitation of genius, failed to attain to the sheer reaches in style and poetic substance which mark the work of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, and while she did not possess the ecstatic lilt of Carman, still she must be ranked as a supreme lyrist of the lovely, evanescent little things in the world. She must be ranked high also as a technical artist. If her poetry does not disclose her as able to achieve the finer strength and beauties of technique in poetic style, that distinguish the poetry of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, she is less often at fault technically than the older poets. Her technical artistry was not an acquired accomplishment; it was a gift of Nature. For while the older poets won their way, by hard striving, to their perfection in technique, Marjorie Pickthall, as early as her sixteenth year of age, displayed a precocious virtuosity, which was almost an instinct, in adroit and ingenious verbal coloring and melody. In the invention of winsome and vivid color epithets and images and in her power for alliterative music in verse, Marjorie Pickthall was, perhaps, surpassed by Pauline Johnson. But Miss Pickthall was the more ingenious of the two poets. The following examples are impressive:—‘Dark with the green silence under the gold weather,’ ‘And close the cowslips’ cups of honeyed gold,’ ‘Yellow for the ripened rye, white for ladies’ wearing,’ ‘Where cling the moths that are the longings of men,’ ‘Thy lips are bright as the edge of the sword,’ ‘On the great green lawns o’ heaven,’ ‘He saw the moonlit rafters of the world,’ ‘Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world,’ ‘And hear new stars come singing from God’s hand,’ ‘To the wind that cried last night like a soul in sin.’