However well-intentioned the attempts to divide the poetical activity of Bliss Carman into _Periods_, on the whole they are not pedagogically successful. Three Periods have been remarked—a so-called Romantic Period, represented by _Low Tide on Grand Pré_ and the _Songs of Vagabondia_ series; a Transcendental Period, represented by _Behind the Arras_, subtitled ‘A Book of the Unseen,’ which indicates its mood, and _The Green Book of the Bards_; and a Synthetic Period, in which his appreciation of the beauty of earth is not contrasted with the evanescence and the mystery of life, but in which there is a joyous acceptance of both. This Synthetic Period is represented by _The Book of the Myths_, _Sappho_, and _April Airs_. Yet in each volume, from _Low Tide on Grand Pré_ (1893) to _April Airs_ (1916), there is in varying degree the same ‘touch of manner,’ the same ‘hint of mood,’ the same occupation _both_ with the beauty of earth and with the mystery and meaning of existence and the universe. Really there is no development of Carman’s genius and art—no periods of growth—after his first book, _Low Tide on Grand Pré_, except an increase in ready mastery, not of technic, but of _clear expression_ of thought and meaning. Some of his finest verbal melody and some of his most compelling lines are in his earlier volumes, and with them also embodiments of his essential thought about life and the universe. But we do note, in each succeeding volume, a gradual decrease in Carman’s _sense_ of world-pain (_weltschmerz_), and an increase in _clearer expression_ of his thought about the mystery of life. To use musical language: in his earlier books Carman heard _discords_ in the universe. They were really not discords but _dissonances_. As he grew older and reflected more philosophically, he was able to resolve these dissonances; and as he gradually achieved this, the more he combined, with clarity and surety, his fine natural powers of lyrical utterance with, to use Meredith’s phrase, his ’reading of earth,’ his intuitions of the ultimate supremacy of the Good.