Syrinx felt the silver sprite fold her at her need.
Hear, ere yet you say farewell, the wind along the reed.
There was no appeal on the part of Service and the other Vaudevillians to the spirit, to the religious imagination. It was inevitable, then, that the Canadian public—and the world—should be arrested by the spiritual beauty, tenderness, wistfulness, and the engaging music of such a poem as Marjorie Pickthall’s Mary Shepherdess, the following three stanzas of which illustrate how the thought is ‘woven and rhymed of light’:—
When the heron’s in the high wood and the last long furrow’s sown,
With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown,
Comes Mary, Mary Shepherdess, a-seeking for her own.
Saint James he calls the righteous fold, Saint John he calls the kind,
Saint Peter seeks the valiant men all to loose or bind,
But Mary seeks the little souls that are so hard to find,
All the little sighing souls born of dust’s despair,