18 REVIEWS — CANADIAN POETRY. 



yet respond, amid these charred stumps and straggling snake-fences of 

 our rough clearings, to Hiawatha's appeal to those j 



"Who loTe the haunts of nature. 



Love the sunshine of the meadow. 



Love the shadow of the forest, 



Love the wind among the branches, 



And the rain-shower and the snow-storm, /- 



And the rushings of great rivers, 



Through their palisades of pine-trees. 



We want our pine-trees for lumher, and, so long as they spare us s 

 surplus for kindling wood, we ask no kindling inspiration from them. 

 The rushing of our great rivers we estimate rejoicingly — for their 

 water-priyileges. The sunshine of the meadow is very welcome to us 

 — in the hay-harvest ; and the poetry of the snow-storm full of the 

 music — of our sleigh-bells. As to our love for the shadow of the forest, 

 that pertains to the romantic simplicity of our squatter stage of infancy, 

 from whence we emerge as fast as possible into the clearing we hew out 

 of it, rejoicing at the crash of falling pines, and keeping time with the 

 music of the axe to the crackling of the logging-pile. We do not mean 

 to say that a poet is an imposibility, amid the rugged realism of this' 

 vigorously practical Canada. The ungenial Ayrshire farm of Mosgiel 

 gave no greater promise of a crop of poetry from its bleak and ex- 

 posed heights before it gave birth to its " Mountain Daisy." But we 

 wonder what would be the estimate of the emigrant settler who should 

 apostrophise the giants of the Canadian back-woods, as they bowed 

 beneath his sturdy stroke, after the fashion of the Ayrshire bard to 

 the "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower" over which he so reluctantly 

 drove the ploughshare. We question much if our minister of agri- 

 culture could be induced to rescue from the rapidly dispersing ordnance 

 reserves a Sabine farm for such a Canadian Virgil. 



Such being the present prospects of the poet amongst us, it is not 

 greatly to be wondered at that such poetry as we do produce is less 

 redolent of "the odors of the forest" than of the essences of the 

 drawing-room ; and more frequently re-echoes the songs that are to be 

 gathered amid the leaves of the library-shelf, than under those with 

 which the wind sports among the branches whereon song-birds 

 warble their nuptial lays. To the class of poetry which thus repeats 

 the old-world musie and song we must assign Mr. Sangster's "St. 

 Lawrence and the Saguenay." It is a pleasant and tasteful depiction 

 of the scenes and associations of our noble river, written in the same 

 fstanza as " Childe Harold," and with some echo of its mode of thought,. 



