When, therefore, Katherine Hale felt the ‘urge’ to create poetry, her reactions to the spiritual world also were in terms of color and music. It is found that her development in poetic writing follows the same order as her development in prose writing. She began as a critic of music and reviewer of literature, but capped all her prose with a finished and arresting work in ‘color-writing,’ _Canadian Cities of Romance_ (1922). She began her poetic creation with the musical or lyrical qualities of her verse much more accentuated than the color qualities, and her themes and forms much more earth-born and conventional than romantic and spiritualized in meaning. But always in her first three books of verse there was the feeling for pictorial or color values and for subtle emotional and spiritual nuances. At length, as in _Morning in the West_, her latest volume, she found her true mode, and poetry became for her the beautiful sketching and etching and painting of the romance of the Canadian spirit. This poetry of the spirit she suffused with all the subtle variations of imaginative ‘color,’ half-lights, shadows, and chiaroscuro of Nature and social life in Canada from the days of the Scots factor and Western _chevalerie_ to the era of the transcontinental railways. Her first two books of verse, _Grey Knitting_ (1914) and _The White Comrade_ (1916), by their very titles suggest the color ‘note.’ But the gift or power of embodying spiritual beauty in lyrical music is always uppermost, as for instance in _The Ultimate Hour_ or _In Noonday_ containing the unforgettable alliterative and musical line:— With dear indefinite delight; or in this stanza from _The Answer_:— Unaltered aisles that wait and wait forever, O woods that gleam and stir in liquid gold, What of your little lover who departed Before the year grew old? In addition to the winsome color and musical qualities of her earlier lyrical verse, we discover a refined spiritual quality in such a sonnet as _The First Christmas_, and a noble spiritualization of romantic love in her sonnet _At Noon_, beginning:— Thou art my Tower in the sun at noon. Katherine Hale’s long poem _The White Comrade_ (1916) discloses notable gifts in blank verse and the power to make a dramatic picture that enthralls the mystical or religious imagination. Her rare gifts of delicate fancy, elfin enchantment from Nature and simple Orphean music, reminding us of Bliss Carman’s light lyrism, is finely exemplified in her spiritualized lyric _I Used to Wear a Gown of Green_, in which beauty and pathos are tenderly commingled:— I used to wear a gown of green And sing a song to May, When apple blossoms starred the stream And Spring came up the way. I used to run along with Love By lanes the world forgets, To find in an enchanted wood The first frail violets.