finest of Mr. Carman's work is contained in his elegiac or
memorial poems, in which he commemorates Keats, Shelley, William Blake,
Lincoln, Stevenson, and other men for whom he has a kindred feeling,
and also friends whom he has loved and lost. Listen to these moving
lines from "Non Omnis Moriar," written in memory of Gleeson White, and
to be found in _Last Songs from Vagabondia_:

There is a part of me that knows,
Beneath incertitude and fear,
I shall not perish when I pass
Beyond mortality's frontier;

But greatly having joyed and grieved,
Greatly content, shall hear the sigh
Of the strange wind across the lone
Bright lands of taciturnity.

In patience therefore I await
My friend's unchanged benign regard,--
Some April when I too shall be
Spilt water from a broken shard.

In "The White Gull," written for the centenary of the birth of Shelley
in 1892, and included in _By the Aurelian Wall_, he thus apostrophizes
that clear and shining spirit:

O captain of the rebel host,
Lead forth and far!
Thy toiling troopers of the night
Press on the unavailing fight;
The sombre field is not yet lost,
With thee for star.

Thy lips have set the hail and haste
Of clarions free
To bugle down the wintry verge
Of time forever, where the surge
Thunders and trembles on a waste
And open sea.

In "A Seamark," a threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson, which appears in
the same volume, the poet hails "R.L.S." (of whose tribe he may be said
to be truly one) as

The master of the roving kind,

and goes on:

O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gypsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood
That dreams of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease.
Perfection's lovers all your lives!

You whom the wander-spirit loves
To lead by some forgotten clue
Forever vanishing beyond
Horizon brinks forever new;
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.

"Perfection's lovers all your lives." Of these, it may be said without
qualification, is Bliss Carman himself.

No summary of Mr. Carman's work, however cursory, would be worthy of
the name if it omitted mention of his ventures in the realm of Greek
myth. _Fro