I see them glimmer where the waters lag By winding bays, and to the swallows sing; And, far away, where stands the forest dim, Huge-built of old, their tremulous lights are seen. High overhead they gleam like trailing stars, Then sink adown, until their emerald sheen Dies in the darkness like an evening hymn,— Anon to float again in glorious bars Of streaming rapture, such as man may hear When the soul casts its slough of mortal fear. And now they make rich spangles in the grass, Gilding the night-dews on the tender blade; Then hover o’er the meadow-pools, to gaze At their bright forms shrined in the dreamy glass Which earth, and air, and bounteous rain have made. One moment, and the thicket is ablaze With twinkling lamps, which swing from bough to bough; Another, and like sylphids they descend To cheer the brook-side where the bell-flow’rs grow, Near, and more near, they softly come, until Their little life is busy at my feet; They glow around me, and my fancies blend Capriciously with their delight, and fill My wakeful bosom with unwonted heat. One lights upon my hand, and there I clutch With an alarming finger its quick wing; Erstwhile so free, it pants, the tender thing! And dreads its captor and his handsel touch. Where is thy home? On what strange food dost feed, Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night? From what far nectar’d fount, or flow’ry mead, Glean’st thou, by witching spells, thy sluicy light? Is not that poem _Canadian_ definitively and through and through—and is it not also authentic poetry, far in advance, aesthetically and artistically, of any poetry previously written in Canada? They who, with master artistry, write delineative poetry, shall hardly achieve, in short and single phrase, so apt and clear and vivid a picture of the Canadian firefly as Mair’s incisively realistic and genuinely poetical line:— Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night. That is masterly, and yet how it fails before such a tremendously pregnant crystallization of the subjective treatment of Nature as Bliss Carman’s pervasive thrall of the senses and the imagination in his imperishable line:— The resonant far-listening morn. The glory that is Carman’s in pure poetry, is not Mair’s, and the glory that is Lampman’s in the sympathetic interpretation of the moods and thoughts of lowly animate Nature, is not Mair’s. Yet unquestionably Mair is the authentic forerunner of those perfervid Nature-worshippers, Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott, the creative Poets of the Systematic School, who wrote the first native and national literature of the Dominion of Canada, and wrote it so that the world heard and has acclaimed them Master Poets and their poetry authentic Literature! * * * * *