Gravedigger," which opens thus:

Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he'll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore--
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.

In "The City of the Sea" (_Last Songs from Vagabondia_) Mr. Carman
speaks of the seabells sounding

The eternal cadence of sea sorrow
For Man's lot and immemorial wrong--
The lost strains that haunt the human dwelling
With the ghost of song.

Elsewhere he speaks of

The great sea, mystic and musical.

And here from another poem is a striking picture:

... the old sea
Seems to whimper and deplore
Mourning like a childless crone
With her sorrow left alone--
The eternal human cry
To the heedless passer-by.

I have said above that Mr. Carman has had three distinct periods, and
intimated that the poems in the following collection are of his third
period. The first period may be said to be represented by the _Low
Tide_ and _Behind the Arras_ volumes, while the second is displayed in
the three volumes of _Songs from Vagabondia_, which he published in
association with his friend Richard Hovey. Bliss Carman was from the
first too original and individual a poet to be directly influenced by
anyone else; but there can be no doubt that his friendship with Hovey
helped to turn him from over-preoccupation with mysteries which, for
all their greatness, are not for man to solve, to an intenser
realisation of the beauty and loveliness of the world about him and of
the joys of human fellowship. The result is seen in such poems as
"Spring Song," quoted in part above, and his perhaps equally well-known
"The Joys of the Road," which appeared in the same volume with that
poem, and a few verses from which follow:

Now the joys of the road are chiefly these:
A crimson touch on the hardwood trees;

A vagrant's morning wide and blue,
In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown,
Alluring up and enticing down

From rippled waters and dappled swamp,
From purple glory to scarlet pomp;

The outward eye, the quiet will,
And the striding heart from hill to hill.

Some of the