"'Where are you going, wistful face,
Face with the mark of shame and tears?'
'I go to find a quiet place
Where no one sees and no one hears.
The beauty and the silence there
Shall thrill me through and still my pain.
Shall touch my hardness into prayer,
And give me back my dreams again.'
'Not so; for Sin has closed the door
On Youth's fair dreams forevermore.'"
"'Where are you going, heart of woe.
Pitiful heart of fear and shame?'
'A strange and lonely way I go,
Where none shall pity, none shall blame.
Far with my sin and misery
I creep on doubtful feet, alone;
No human heart can follow me
To mark my tears or hear my moan.'
'Nay; but the never-ceasing sting,
The clearness of remembering!'
"'What do you see, O changing face,
Alight with strange and tender gleams?'
'I near the hushed and holy place
Of One who gives me back my dreams.'
'Where are you daring, eager feet,
Feet that so wild a way have trod?'
'O bitter world, no scorn I meet.
Sinful and hurt, I go to God!
On my dark sin, forevermore,
A sinless Hand has closed the door.'"
Miss Huestis dons her singing-robes too infrequently; but who may venture on any prediction regarding the poetic production of one who is still on the threshold of achievement? For the poet, himself, least of all, may foresee his own future, nor is it given to those who love his songs to discern his future in the magic glass. The poet is ever a subject in a kingdom of untraced laws and unmapped territory.
"For voices pursue him by day
And haunt him by night;
And he listens, and needs must obey
When the Angel says 'Write!'"
Forever does he await the Voice and the Vision.
Louis Frechette is the French-Canadian Laureate, who was crowned by the French Academy, in 1881, for the striking merit of his tragedy, Papineau. Doctor Frechette (born in 1841) has contributed greatly to the fame of his country. In his La Decouverte du Mississippi, and in Le Drapeau Anglais, Saint-Malo, and others, is his real distinction felt. His poems are so long and so closely woven as hardly to lend themselves to extracts.
Thomas O'Hagan is one of the favourite poets of the Dominion, and aside from his own notable contribution to poetry, he has done and is doing a wonderful work in his scholarly and critical lectures on poets. His published lectures interpretative of Shakespeare, of Dante, and of Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, and others, are in constant demand. In A Gate of Flowers, An Idyll of the Farm, The Bugle Call, and the timely production I Take Off my Hat to Albert, are poems that inspire the popular favour; and in a lyric entitled Ripened Fruit these stanzas are especially calculated to awaken response:
"I know not what my heart hath lost;
I cannot strike the chords of old:
The breath that charmed my morning life
Hath chilled each leaf within the wold.