Other _Songs of the Common Day_, forelooking to the later poet, are “The Silver Thaw,” “Canadian Streams,” and “The Wood Frolic,” having the first-hand, magnetic touch distinguishing every line of Mr. Roberts’ out-of-door verse in that volume which first truly reveals him,—_The Book of the Native_. So conscious is one of a new force in this book that it would seem to represent another personality. Its opening poem, “Kinship,” turns for inspiration, Back to the bewildering vision And the border-land of birth; Back into the looming wonder, The Companionship of Earth, and puts the query to nature: Tell me how some sightless impulse, Working out a hidden plan, God for kin and clay for fellow, Wakes to find itself a man. Tell me how the life of mortal, Wavering from breath to breath, Like a web of scarlet pattern Hurtles from the loom of death. How the caged bright bird, Desire, Which the hands of God deliver, Beats aloft to drop unheeded At the confines of forever. Faints unheeded for a season, Then outwings the farthest star, To the wisdom and the stillness Where thy consummations are. This sounds the keynote to _The Book of the Native_, which is equally concerned with the enigmas of the soul and the mysteries of nature. The questing spirit is abroad in it; the unquenched faith, the vitality, the hidden import of life is in it; and while its metaphysics do not go to the point of developing a definite philosophy, they set one to thinking for himself, which is a better service. “Origins,” a speculation as to our coming from “the enigmatic Will,” and the “Unsleeping,” a vision of the Force brooding over life,—are among the strongest poems of this motive. To cite the second: I soothe to unimagined sleep The sunless bases of the deep, And then I stir the aching tide That gropes in its reluctant side. I heave aloft the smoking hill: To silent peace its throes I still. But ever at its heart of fire I lurk, an unassuaged desire. I wrap me in the sightless germ An instant or an endless term; And still its atoms are my care, Dispersed in ashes or in air. I hush the comets one by one To sleep for ages in the sun; The sun resumes before my face His circuit of the shores of space. The mount, the star, the germ, the deep, They all shall wake, they all shall sleep. Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane. Space, in the dim predestined hour, Shall crumble like a ruined tower. I only, with unfaltering eye, Shall watch the dreams of God go by. What a fine touch in the lines declaring that Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane!