But Carman’s essays are not prose poetry. He did not attempt, as Roberts attempted in his prose, to write impressionistic prose. Carman does not aim at mere color-writing for its own sake. What he attempts and achieves is a subtle analysis of the history of the spirit in its relations to man and to God and the whole universe. Because this was his aim, Carman was solicitous about his style—especially about clarity of diction and pure beauty of imagery, and about the simplicity and readableness of the structure of his sentences. In short, Carman’s prose style has the same simplicity and directness and chaste beauty of imagery and spiritual exaltation which we find in his lyrics. For this reason we may signalize Carman’s prose as ‘lyrical’ prose. But we are by no means to allow this epithet to connote anything like sensuous impressionism or vague imagination. It is all solid, if sublimated, thought about profound matters, addressed to the imaginative reason or the religious imagination, and addressed in a style so clear and direct and so emotionally pure that it affects the heart and the imagination lyrically. An essayist in another style is Archibald MacMechan. Dr. MacMechan has published two volumes, _The Porter of Bagdad_ (1901) and _The Life of a Little College_ (1914); and he has published several booklets of essays in a series of ‘chap books.’ Dr. MacMechan is unsurpassed in Canada as a writer of the Light Essay. He differs of course from Carman in bent of genius as an essayist. Carman employs the religious or metaphysical imagination and appeals to our sensibilities. Dr. MacMechan employs the fancy. His essays are essentially, as he indicates in the title of _The Porter of Bagdad_, ‘fantasies’ or reveries. His style has a lightness of touch which is inviting and ingratiating, and he has a delicate and pleasant gift of humor. He is hardly Addisonian, but the substance of his essays, their diction, and the movement of his sentences engage the attention and delight the sense of form with the readiness and pleasant intrigue of the essays of Addison. Not in so light a style and not with such playful fancy as Dr. MacMechan’s are the essays of W. H. Blake, widely known as the translator of Louis Hémon’s romantic idyll of French Canada, _Maria Chapdelaine_. Mr. Blake’s _Brown Waters and Other Sketches_, _In a Fishing Country_, and _A Fisherman’s Luck_ indicate the scope and method of his essays. They are ‘sketches’ of objective experiences. They are not fantasies or reveries. The intellect, rather than the fancy, is the creative faculty most employed in them. Mr. Blake’s essays, therefore, have not the lightness and the limpidity of MacMechan’s but they contain happy revealments of Nature in Canada and of the human spirit against a background of Nature. At times, they contain patches of engaging ‘color-writing.’