COR. No, it is snow and wine. BEAT. He wanders! PERTH. I had not thought to find it so at last, Yet here, and here alone, it has arisen Within these two—my only youth! Yes—now! Upon this hour and place at last! The Source! It is a barren place—yet flowers are here, Those which for certain days I seemed to lose; A desolate tender fatherhood has here Found growth, and bears, but all too piteously, A futile bud. The impression left upon one by _El Dorado_ is that of poetic distinction, and the drama in its character drawing, plot and action is an augury of finer possibilities in the same branch of art. XVII GERTRUDE HALL MISS GERTRUDE HALL is a poet of the intimate mood, the personal touch, one who writes for herself primarily, and not for others. One fancies that verses such as these were penned in musing, introspective moments in the form in which they flitted through the mind, and were indesecrate of further touch. They are as words warm upon the lips, putting one in magnetic _rapport_ with a speaker; and their defects, as well as distinctions, are such as spring from this spontaneity. Frequently a change of word or line, readily suggested to the reader, would have made technically perfect what now bears a flaw; but these lapses are neither so marked nor so frequent as to detract from the prevailing grace of the verse, and but serve to illustrate the point in question,—their unpremeditated note and freedom from posing. One is not so much arrested by the inevitable image and word in these lyrics of the _Age of Fairygold_, as by the feeling, the mood, that pervades them. It is not a buoyant mood, nor yet a sombre one, but rather the expression of a varied impulse, a melody of many stops, such as one might play for himself at evening, wandering from theme to theme. The poems convey the impression of coming in touch with a personality rather than a book, the veil between the author and reader being impalpable; and this, their most obvious distinction, is a quality in which many poets of the present day are lacking, either from a mistaken delicacy in regarding their own inner life as an isolated mood not of import to others, or in robbing it of personality and warmth by technical elaboration.