About whose golden setting sweeps the trail to Lillooet.
Pauline Johnson has also achieved what may be noted in literary history as the first strictly Canadian ‘cradle-song’—Canadian in music and in setting—her Lullaby of the Iroquois.
As a nature-colorist and etcher Pauline Johnson again must be given a very high place. For a genre etching of the human figure against a background of nature her Joe, which she herself sub-titles ‘An Etching,’ is as vividly presented and as fetching as a genre drawing by Murillo. Her Lady Lorgnette is as daintily graphic and colorful and piquant and romantic as anything done by the brush of Romney or Gainsborough or by the later modern ‘society’ miniaturists. She had the pictorial artist’s eye to spy out a picture in Nature, as in At Husking Time. She had the impressionist’s mastery of sensuous pigmentation, as in Under Canvas. She could make a picture low-keyed, full of shadows and suggested sensations and mystery, as in Nocturne and in Moonset.
Finally: Pauline Johnson is certainly not surpassed, if equalled, by any other Canadian lyrist as an inventor of beautiful color epithets and of picturesque, vivid, and compelling metaphors. They are to be found everywhere in her poetry. Consider these as examples—‘Russet needles as censers swing to an altar,’ ‘The sea-weeds cling with flesh-like fingers,’ ‘Beaten gold that clung like coils of kisses love inlaid,’ ‘The brownish hills with needles green and gold,’ ‘O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise,’ ‘Swept beneath a shore of shade, beneath a velvet moon,’ ‘Like net work threads of fire,’ and this,
Purple her eyes as the mists that dream
At the edge of some laggard, sun-drowned stream
and many more as novel, colorful, musical, veracious and compelling.
As a woman Pauline Johnson was a rare and beautiful spirit. As a poet she was of all Canadian poets the most pervasively true to her Canadian origin and habitat. She is not to be given always the status of Lampman and Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott, yet to her unquestionably belongs a place beside these Canadian singers. Her poetry had a magic of music and a color of leafy lawns and lovely grey-eyed and tawny dusks and clear ecstatic morns, which were all her own. She was indeed a ‘Mohawk Warbler,’ and her songs are
Free and artless as the avian lays
Heard in Canadian woods on April days.