permanent fame. The poems of the well known American authors, Aldrich, Gilder and Stedman, have certainly an easy rhythmical flow and an artistic finish which the majority of Canadian poetic aspirants should study with far more closeness. At the same time it may be said that even these artists do not often surpass in poetic thought the best productions of the Canadians to whom I have referred as probably illustrating most perfectly the highest development so far among us of this department of _belles-lettres_. It is not often that one comes across more exquisitely conceived poems than some of those written by Mr. John Reade, whom the laborious occupation of journalism and probably the past indifference of a Canadian public to Canadian poetry have for a long while diverted from a literary field where it would seem he should have won a wider fame. Among the verses which one can read time and again are those of which the first lines are "In my heart are many chambers through which I wander free, Some are furnished, some are empty, some are sombre, some are light; Some are open to all comers, and of some I keep the key, And I enter in the stillness of the night."[41][C] It would be interesting as well as instructive if some competent critic, with the analytical faculty and the poetic instinct of Matthew Arnold or Sainte-Beuve, were to study the English and French Canadian poets and show whether they are mere imitators of the best models of French and English literature, or whether their work contains within itself those germs which give promise of original fruition in the future. It will be remembered that the French critic, though a poet of merit himself, has spoken of what he calls "the radical inadequacy of French poetry." In his opinion, whatever talent the French poets have for strophe and line, their work, as a rule is "too slight, too soon read, too poor in ideas, to influence a serious mind for any length of time." No doubt many others think that, in comparison with the best conceptions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Browning and Tennyson, French poetry is, generally speaking, inadequate for the expression of the most sublime thoughts, of the strongest passion, or of the most powerful imagination, and though it must always please us by its easy rhythm and lucidity of style, it fails to make that vivid impression on the mind and senses which is the best test of that true poetic genius which influences generations and ever lives in the hearts of the people. It represents in some respects the lightness and vivacity of the French intellectual temperament under ordinary conditions, and not the strength of the national character, whose depths are only revealed at some crisis which evokes a deep sentiment of patriotism. "Partant pour la Syrie," so often heard in the days of the last Bonaparte regime, probably illustrated this lighter tendency