t in Miss Johnson's nature, but free from
sentimentality; and even a carping critic will find little to cavil
at in her productions. If fault should be found with any of them it
would probably be with such a narrative as "Wolverine." It "bites,"
like all her Indian pieces, and conveys a definite meaning. But,
written in the conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her
other work, and seems out of form, if not out of place.

However, no poet escapes a break at times, and Miss Johnson's
work is not to be judged, like a chain, by its weakest links.
Its beauty, its strength, its originality are unmistakable, and
although, had she lived, we might have looked for still higher
flights of her genius, yet what we possess is beyond price, and
fully justifies the feeling, everywhere expressed, that Canada has
lost a true poet.

Such a loss may not be thought a serious one by the sordid man
who decries poetry as the useless product of an art already in
its decay. Should this ever be the case, it would be a monstrous
symptom, a symptom that the noblest impulses of the human heart are
decaying also. The truth is, as the greatest of English critics,
Hazlitt, has told us, that "poetry is an interesting study, for
this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in
human life. Whoever, therefore, has a contempt for poetry, has a
contempt for himself and humanity."

Turning from Miss Johnson's verse to her prose, there is ample
evidence that, had she applied herself, she would have taken high
rank as a writer of fiction. Her "Legends of Vancouver" is a
remarkable book, in which she relates a number of Coast-Indian
myths and traditions with unerring insight and literary skill.
These legends had a main source in the person of the famous old
Chief, Capilano, who, for the first time, revealed them to her in
Chinook, or in broken English, and, as reproduced in her rich and
harmonious prose, belong emphatically to what has been called "The
literature of power." Bound together, so to speak, in the retentive
memory of the old Chief, they are authentic legends of his people,
and true to the Indian nature. But we find in them, also, something
that transcends history. Indefinable forms, earthly and unearthly,
pass before us in mystical procession, in a world beyond ordinary
conception, in which nothing seems impossible.

The origin of the Indian's myths, East or West, cannot be traced,
and must ever remain a mystery. But,