Because I knew he wanted us
To be asleep.
Miss Peabody’s work, considered in its entirety, is distinguished by an art of rare grace and delicacy, by imagination and vision, susceptibility to the finer impressions, and by an ever-present ideality; and while it lacks somewhat the element of personal emotion and passion, it has a sympathy subtle and spiritual, if less intimate in its revealing.
VII
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
MR. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS presents so marked an example of evolution in the style of his work and the sources of his inspiration, that he has from volume to volume, like the nautilus, “changed his last year’s dwelling for the new,” and having entered the “more stately mansion” has “known the old no more.”
The first chamber which he fashioned for himself in the House of Art could not long contain him, as its walls were built of myths and traditions, incapable of further expansion. This was the period of Orion and Other Poems, such as “Ariadne,” “Memnon,” and “Launcelot And The Four Queens,” work done prior to 1880 and creditable to the initial effort of a young collegian.
The second lodging was scarcely more permanent; though structured less in myth, and showing a gain in workmanship, it was still too narrow a dwelling for an expanding spirit, and did little more than give foretokens
of that which should succeed it. The volume contained, however, one admirable composition, one that remains as vital and apposite as when it was written,—the stirring stanzas to Canada. Indeed, the fine courage, the higher loyalty that distinguishes this appeal, lifts it from the mere grandiloquent utterance of a young man with over-hasty convictions, to a noble arraignment, and leads one to wonder why other poets of her domain do not turn their pens to revealing her to herself as does this fine utterance.
Mr. Roberts’ third volume, Songs of the Common Day, bore almost no relation to its predecessors, and might have been the work of a different hand, as regards both subject and style. Legend and myth had wholly disappeared, and experience had begun to furnish the raw material, the flax, for the poet’s spindle and distaff which earlier effort had been making ready. Not yet, however, had the work the virility and tang that smack in the very first line of its successor, The Book of the Native. It was graceful, artistic singing, but lacking, except in a few instances, the large free note that sounds in the later work. Among its lyrics is one of exquisite tenderness, as sad and sweet as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” and