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.
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