6 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



of extended notice, Marjorie Pickthall, and our own secretary, Duncan 

 Campbell Scott. 



In her little book, "Drift of Pinions," and in "The Lamp of Poor 

 Souls," (1916,) Miss Pickthall revealed a rare and sensitive talent. 

 Few who have read them will not go back again and again to "Mary- 

 Shepherdess," or to "A Mother in Egypt" or to "Duna." Of late she 

 has spread her strengthening wings for bolder flights, and has mastered 

 blank verse; a short drama, "The Wood-Carver's Wife" in the 

 University Magazine for April, 1920, represents a sustained and 

 successful effort in blank verse, interwoven with short swallow flights 

 of lyric. Alike in the blank verse and in the lyrics her word weaving 

 is curiously and daintily felicitous. She has ceased to sing entirely 

 in a minor key, and while she brings the eternal note of sadness in, 

 she now grapples boldly with the deepest problems of human life 

 and art, though always with the curious romantic restraint which 

 she has caught from Rossetti, and which gives rather the effect to me 

 of one looking at a tragedy through stained glass. When I speak of 

 Rossetti I am far from any thought of imitation. Miss Pickthall 

 draws her literary inspiration from many sources; from Rossetti and 

 Swinburne, from the Irish singers such as Yeats and Moira O'Neill, 

 and at times from A Shropshire Lad; but she has made their music 

 her own, and her strain is reminiscent but not imitative. I would 

 like to linger over her borrowing from Swinburne, so much finer and 

 more purified than the long loping lolloping line which is all the 

 Australians have taken from him. 



But the most considerable body of poetry produced in Canada 

 in the Twentieth Century is that of the poet who honours us by being 

 the Secretary of this Society, Duncan Campbell Scott. In the inter- 

 vals of his long and honourable career in the Department of Indian 

 affairs, Mr. Scott from time to time put forth his modest little volumes. 

 His literary career has been singularly self-contained, and sets us a 

 noble example in its freedom from any touch of affectation or self- 

 advertisement. "The Magic House and Other Poems," appeared in 

 1893, the year of Sir John Bourinot's paper, and since then we have 

 had "Labour, and the Angel," in 1898; "New World Lyrics and 

 Ballads," in 1905; and "Lundy's Lane and other Poems," in 1916; 

 besides a volume of short stories: "In the Village of Viger" (1896), 

 and other smaller and uncollected booklets. Each volume seems 

 to me to be an improvement upon the last, to show a steady develop- 

 ment, to represent the gradual evolution of a temperament, not with- 

 out a sensitive response to outside influences, yet essentially evolving 

 rather than receiving. 



