APPENDIX A LV 



seclusion, in her most individual poems, not the seclusion of a cloister, 

 but the seclusion of a walled garden with an outlook towards the sea 

 and the mountains. Life was beyond the garden somewhere, and 

 murmurously, rumours of it came between the walls and caused 

 longing and disquiet. . The voice could be heard mingling the real 

 appearance of the garden with the imagined forms of life beyond it 

 and with remembrances from dim legends and from the untarnished 

 old romances of the world. Her work was built on a ground bass 

 of folk melody, and wreathed about it were Greek phrases and glamours 

 from the "Song of Songs." But composite of all these influences, it 

 was yet original and reached the heart with a wistfulness of comfort. 

 She had a feeling for our little brothers of the air and the woods that 

 was sometimes classical, sometimes mediaeval. Fauns and hama- 

 dryads peopled her moods, and our familiar birds and flowers took 

 on quaint forms like the conventional shapes and mellow colours of 

 tapestries woven long ago. "Bind above your breaking heart the 

 echo of a Song"- — that was her cadence, the peculiar touch that gives 

 a feeling of loneliness and then heals it, and if one might have said to 

 her any words at parting, they would have been her own words — 

 "Take, ere yet you say good-bye, the love of all the earth". 



These two lives are typical of the struggle of those who attempt 

 the literary life in Canada. Lampman existed in the Civil Service, 

 and was paid as any other clerk for the official work he did. Neither 

 his position nor his advances in that position were given in recognition 

 of his literary gifts. From this bleak vantage ground he sent out his 

 version of the beauty of the world. Miss Pickthall was more definitely 

 in the stream of letters, and her contributions to the periodical press 

 in prose and verse gave her an assured standing and due rewards. 



There is no necessity here and now for an apology for poetry nor 

 for a defence of anyone who in Sir Philip Sydney's words "showeth 

 himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty 

 to be seen by the eyes of the mind". I admire that ideal, set up by 

 the Welsh saying for the perfect man, the man who could "build a 

 boat and sail it, tame a horse and ride it, make an ode and set it to 

 music". None of us could qualify for perfection under this hard and 

 inclusive test. It covers, you will observe, mastery of several kinds, — 

 mastery of craftsmanship, and fearless daring; mastery of a difficult 

 and most noble animal; and, finally, the crowning mastery of poetry 

 and music. We find it true of all peoples that these two arts are the 

 cap stones of their civilizations. We are as far as ever from an under- 

 standing of what poetry really is, although we are at one in giving 



