In all their eyries eagles shall mourn thy fate, And leaving on the lonely crags and scaurs Their unprotected young, shall congregate High in the tenuous heaven and anger the sun With screams, and with a wild audacity Dare all the battle danger of thy flight; Till weary with combat one shall desert the light, Fall like a bolt of thunder and check his fall On the high ledge, smoky with mist and cloud, Where his neglected eaglets shriek aloud, And drawing the film across his sovereign sight Shall dream of thy swift soul immortal Mounting in circles, faithful beyond death. In that poem we perceive, unmistakably, how even war verse may rise to the spiritual dignity of absolute poetry, and by its ideal substance and spiritual grandeur achieve the highest moral and religious function—the function, namely, of dignifying or glorifying the human spirit with Christlikeness in self-slaying love for the perfection and happiness of humanity. Only a too fastidious and perverted criticism will deny to the best of the Canadian poetry of the World War a distinction in truth, beauty, and splendor of ideas and in technical artistry that gives it the right to an equal place beside the significant war verse of the British and United States poets. Certainly in technique it is quite as finished as the American war poetry, and in ideas of ‘uncompelled and undiluted chivalry,’ it is as noble and eloquent as the war poetry of the British singers. CHAPTER XXVI Hymn Writers THE HYMN WRITERS OF CANADA—ALLINE—CLEVELAND—SCRIVEN— MURRAY— SCOTT—RAND—DEWART—WALKER—AND OTHERS. A hymn is a form of sacred lyrical literature. It must be popular literature, but not necessarily pure poetry or permanent literature. A hymn is properly defined not by what it _is_ in literary qualities but by what it _does_ for the human spirit—for the heart and the religious imagination. It aims lyrically to express dependence on divine providence, to praise the divine perfections, to give thanks for divine mercies and benefits, and to supplicate divine aid in doubt and weakness and divine consolation in tribulation and defeat. A hymn, in short, is the spontaneous lyrical expression of a paternal and filial relationship between Man and God.