And yet to me not this or that
Is always sharp or always sweet;
In the sloped shadow of my hat

I lean at rest, and drain the heat;
Nay more, I think some blessed power
Hath brought me wandering idly here:
In the full furnace of this hour

My thoughts grow keen and clear.

OUTLOOK.

Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
But to stand free: to keep the mind at brood
On life's deep meaning, nature's altitude
Of loveliness, and time's mysterious ways;
At every thought and deed to clear the haze

Out of our eyes, considering only this,
What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,
This is to live, and win the final praise.
Though strife, ill fortune, and harsh human need
Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb
With agony; yet, patience—there shall come

Many great voices from life's outer sea,

Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,
Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.

THE WOODCUTTER'S HUT.

Far up in the wild and wintry hills in the heart of the cliff-broken woods,

Where the mounded drifts lie soft and deep in the noiseless

solitudes,

The hut of the lonely woodcutter stands, a few rough beams that show

A blunted peak and a low black line, from the glittering waste

of snow.

In the frost-still dawn from his roof goes up in the windless, motionless air,

The thin, pink curl of leisurely smoke; through the forest white and bare

The woodcutter follows his narrow trail, and the morning rings and cracks

"

With the rhythmic jet of his sharp-blown breath and the echoing shout of his axe.

Only the waft of the wind besides, or the stir of some hardy bird— The call of the friendly chickadee, or the pat of the nut-hatchis heard;

Or a rustle comes from a dusky clump, where the busy siskins feed, And scatter the dimpled sheet of the snow with the shells of the cedar-seed.

Day after day the woodcutter toils untiring with axe and wedge, Till the jingling teams come up from the road that runs by the

valley's edge,

With plunging of horses, and hurling of snow, and many a shouted word,

And carry away the keen-scented fruit of his cutting, cord upon cord.

Not the sound of a living foot comes else, not a moving visitant

there,

Save the delicate step of some halting doe, or the sniff of à prowling bear.

And only the stars are above him at night, and the trees that creak and groan,

And the frozen, hard-swept mountain-crests with their silent fronts of stone,

As he watches the sinking glow of his fire and the wavering flames upcaught,

Cleaning his rifle or mending his moccasins, sleepy and slow of thought.

Or when the fierce snow comes, with the rising wind, from the grey north-east,

He lies through the leaguering hours in his bunk like a winter

Or sits on the hard-packed earth, and smokes by his draught

blown guttering fire,

Without thought or remembrance, hardly awake, and waits for the storm to tire.

Scarcely he hears from the rock-rimmed heights to the wild

ravines below,

Near and far off, the limitless wings of tempest hurl and go In roaring gusts that plunge through the cracking forest, and lull, and lift,

All day without stint and all night long with the sweep of the hissing drift.

But winter shall pass ere long with its hills of snow and its fettered dreams,

And the forest shall glimmer with living gold, and chime with

the gushing of streams;

Millions of little points of plants shall prick through its matted floor,

And the wind-flower lift and uncurl her silken buds by the wood

man's door;

The sparrow shall see and exult; but lo! as the spring draws gaily on,

The woodcutter's hut is empty and bare, and the master that made it is gone.

He is gone where the gathering of valley men another labour

yields,

To handle the plough and the harrow, and scythe, in the heat of the summer fields.

He is gone with his corded arms, and his ruddy face, and his moccasined feet,

The animal man in his warmth and vigour, sound, and hard and complete.

And all summer long, round the lonely hut, the black earth burgeons and breeds,

Till the spaces are filled with the tall-plumed ferns and the triumphing forest-weeds;

The thick wild raspberries hem its walls, and stretching on either hand,

The red-ribbed stems and the giant leaves of the sovereign spikenard stand.

So lonely and silent it is, so withered and warped with the sun

and snow,

You would think it the fruit of some dead man's toil a hundred

years ago;

And he who finds it suddenly there, as he wanders far and alone, Is touched with a sweet and beautiful sense of something tender

and gone,

The sense of a struggling life in the waste, and the mark of a soul's command,

The going and coming of vanished feet, the touch of a human hand.

TEMAGAMI.

Far in the grim North-west beyond the lines
That turn the rivers eastward to the sea,

Set with a thousand islands, crowned with pines,
Lies the deep water, wild Temagami :
Wild for the hunter's roving, and the use
Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales,
Wild with the trampling of the giant moose,
And the weird magic of old Indian tales.
All day with steady paddles toward the west
Our heavy-laden long canoe we pressed:
All day we saw the thunder-travelled sky
Purpled with storm in many a trailing tress,
And saw at eve the broken sunset die
In crimson on the silent wilderness.

WAYAGAMACK.

Beautiful are thy hills, Wayagamack,

Thy depths of lonely rock, thine endless piles
Of grim birch forest and thy spruce-dark isles,
Thy waters fathomless and pure and black,
But golden where the gravel meets the sun,
And beautiful thy twilight solitude,
The gloom that gathers over lake and wood
A weirder silence when the day is done.
For ever wild, too savage for the plough,
Thine austere beauty thou canst never lose.
Change shall not mar thy loneliness, nor tide
Of human trespass trouble thy repose,
The Indian's paddle and the hunter's stride
Shall jar thy dream, and break thy peace enow.

HAROLD VERSCHOYLE WRONG.

[Born 1891, at Toronto. Killed in action at Thiepval, July 1, 1916.] DEATH.

I felt the clouds and all around me mist;

Behind, the twilight; a great flame, before,
That pierced the thickspun texture of the clouds;
Behind, it cleared, the mist was all before.

I stood upon a pinnacle that rose

High in the air, and yet there was no height,
But all the world lay near within my grasp.
Light was my soul and my feet urged me on,
On through the grey that cloaked the distant flame;
I paused and looked, then forward turned once more,
And forward strode into the foaming cloud.

And as I went the flame grew bright and wide,
And all was brilliant with that blazing light
Which dazzled me and filled my eyes with red,

Till I was blinded and fell fainting down.

Then cleared the clouds and there was no more mist.

THE GREAT ADVENTURE.

The travel birds which journey in the spring
Lust after pleasures of awakened sight;
They rout the weather in a truceless fight,
And swell their souls with joy of buffeting
And constant strife. To know the unknown thing,
To see the unseeable in God's despite,
To try his strength against another's might,
This set Ulysses to his wandering.

And this we still desire, we, who live

Clamped to the dulness of an ordered round;
'Tis ours to take the best the world can give,
And if the taking slay us on the way
What loss is that? We too were outward bound
Beyond the narrow shelter of the bay.