A QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF LETTERS

Founded January, 1889

Devoted to Appreciation of the Poets and Comparative Literature. Its object is to bring Life and Letters into closer touch with each other, and, accordingly, its work is carried on in a new spirit: it considers literature as an exponent of human evolution rather than as a finished product, and aims to study life and the progress of ideals in letters.

EDITORS:

CHARLOTTE PORTER and HELEN A. CLARKE

HONORARY ASSOCIATE EDITORS

W. J. ROLFE, Litt.D., Cambridge, Mass. WILLIAM G. KINGSLAND, London, England, HIRAM CORSON, LL.D., Prof. of English Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Address all editorial communications to

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Poet-lore (Old Series) from January, 1889, to August

September, 1896, inclusive, was

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In a garden over Grand Pré, dewy in the morning sun,
Here in earliest September with the summer nearly done,
Musing on the lovely world and all its beauties, one by one!

Bluets, marigolds, and asters, scarlet poppies, purple phlox,—
Who knows where the key is hidden to those frail yet perfect locks
In the tacit doors of being where the soul stands still and knocks?

There is Blomidon's blue sea-wall, set to guard the turbid straits
Where the racing tides have entry; but who keeps for us the gates
In the mighty range of silence where man's spirit calls and waits?

Where is Glooscaap?

West,

There's a legend of that savior of the

The benign one, whose all-wisdom loved beasts well, though men

the best,

Whom the tribes of Minas leaned on, and their villages had rest.

Once the lodges were defenceless, all the warriors being gone
On a hunting or adventure. Like a panther on a fawn,

On the helpless stole a war-band, ambushed to attack at dawn.

But with night came Glooscaap. Sleeping he surprised them; waved his bow;

Through the summer leaves descended a great frost, as white as

snow;

Sealed their slumber to eternal peace and stillness long ago.

Then a miracle. Among them, while still death undid their

thews,

Slept a captive with her children. Such the magic he could use, She arose unharmed with morning, and departing told the news.

He, too, when the mighty Beaver had the country for his pond, All the way from the Pereau here to Bass River and beyond, Stoned the rascal; drained the Basin; routed out that vagabond.

You can see yourself Five Islands Glooscaap flung at him that day, When from Blomidon to Sharp he tore the Beaver's dam away,Cleared the channel, and the waters thundered out into the bay.

(Do we idle, little children? Ah, well, there is hope, maybe, In mere beauty which enraptures just such ne'er-do-wells as we! I must go and pick my apples. Malyn will be calling me!)

Here he left us see the orchards, red and gold in every tree!
All the land from Gaspereau to Portapique and Cheverie,
All the garden lands of Minas and a passage out to sea.

You can watch the white-sailed vessels through the meadows wind

and creep.

All day long the pleasant sunshine, and at night the starry sleep, While the laboring tides that rest not have their business with the

deep!

So I get my myth and legend of a breaker-down of bars,
Putting gateways in the mountains with their thousand-year-old scars,
That the daring and the dauntless might steer outward by the stars.

So my demiurgic hero lays a frost on all our fears.

Dead the grisly superstition; dead the bigotry of years;

Dead the tales that frighten children when the large slow light appears.

Thus did Glooscaap of the mountains. What doth Balder of the flowers,

Balder, the white lord of April, who comes back amid the showers And the sunshine to the Northland to revive this earth of ours?

First, how came my garden, where untimely not a leaf may wilt? For a thousand years the currents trenched the rock and wheeled the silt,

Dredged and filled and smoothed and levelled, toiling that it might be built.

For the moon pulled and the sun pushed on the derrick of the

tide;

And a great wind heaved and blustered,— swung the weight round with a stride,

Mining tons of red detritus out of the old mountain side,—

Bore them down and laid them even by the mouth of stream and rill For the quiet lowly doorstep, for cemented joist and sill

Of our Grand Pré, where the cattle lead their shadows or lie still.

So my garden floor was founded by the laboring frugal sea,
Deep and virginal as Eden, for the flowers that were to be,
All for my great drowsy poppies and my marigolds and me.

Who had guessed the unsubstantial end and outcome of such

toil,

These, the children of a summer, whom a breath of frost would foil, I, almost as faint and fleeting as my brothers of the soil?