He repeated his trumpeting to the Canadian to awake to a national consciousness of destiny and to achieve that destiny—he repeated the ‘call’ in language even more magniloquent—in his Ode to the Canadian Confederacy.

Perhaps these were only ‘occasional’ poems, artificially inspired. At any rate Roberts’ Vision of Canadian nationality and his interest in expressing it forsook him. A few years after uttering the ‘Call’ he left his native Canadian habitat (in 1895) for New York. Yet in the fifteen years from 1880 to 1895 in the homeland, or till his removing to New York, by his own fine artistry and by the influence, at least of his example, on his contemporaries in Canada, Roberts was considerably, perhaps chiefly, potent in raising native Canadian poetry to a degree of technical finish that was never before reached or even attempted by native-born Canadian men and women of letters.

Summarily: as discoverer and sponsor of Lampman, as inspirer and sponsor of Carman, and as exemplar, at least in technical ideals, to the first native-born group of systematic poets of the Dominion, Charles G. D. Roberts wielded a constructive influence on Canadian native and national poetry. That without his influence there would still have been a Systematic School of Canadian Poets, of which Lampman, Carman, or D. C. Scott might have been the most conspicuous creator, is a high probability. But it is a theoretical probability. We cannot, however, gainsay the fact of Roberts’ constructive influence on his confrères in the Systematic School of Canadian Poets. On the grounds, therefore, of his triple role as sponsor, inspirer, and exemplar, and of his own creative poetic art, Charles G. D. Roberts is justly to be distinguished as the Inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

Roberts’ own poetry may be critically appreciated (1) as a recrudescence of the English classical idyll; (2) as poetry of nature, with special reference to its distinction from the nature-poetry of Lampman; (3) as elegiac poetry; and (4) as poetry of modern eroticism.

At the outset it is important to emphasize two singular facts. First, with the single notable exception of Roberts’ spasmodic ‘Call’ to the Canadian people to achieve a national destiny, and with the further exception of a national or Canadian setting and color in some of his nature-poetry, Roberts’ verse is anything but Canadian. Secondly, Roberts’ poetry is signally an example of poetry which is not, to use Mathew Arnold’s formula, ‘a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life.’ It is characteristic of the essential Canadian genius that its attitudes to the universe and to existence are moral and religious, that it values the fine arts, including literature, as a means for the ideal enhancement of life, and loves the Beautiful in the fine arts as the only visible instance of the union of the real and of the ideal, which is, philosophically viewed, our only pledge of the ultimate supremacy of the Good. The only really deadly criticism, therefore, that can be applied against the poetry of Roberts is that he has missed in his own verse the supreme ethical note or ideal which is in the poetry of one of his masters, Keats:—

and that he did not engage himself to write poetry, with the intent which was really the aim of Keats, as well as of Arnold, namely, as a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. Aware now of the unethical intent and quality of Robert’s poetry, we can the better and more justly appreciate his development as a poet and his achievements in poetic substance and technique.

It was natural and inevitable that an undergraduate introduced, at College, into the world of letters through the poetry of the Greek and Latin classics and the highly lyrical and sensuous poetry of Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, should, when he himself felt impelled to write, produce poetry which, in substance and style, was based on classical themes, and colored with sensuous images, and that, when critically estimated, this poetry should be valued as a sincere but finished academic exercise in verse. Roberts’ first volume, Orion and Other Poems, was just such an academic exercise in verse. Yet it was an exercise by a lad just out of college who not only informed his verse with a respectable showing of classical scholarship and with an engaging Arcadian setting and color but also wrote with so careful a technique that when his verse was compared with that of earlier Canadian poets, it was found to be unprovincial in scope and appeal, and more finished in technique than any previous Canadian verse. It was indeed derivative, literary, academic. It was vitiated with youthful crudities in thought and manner and certain borrowings. But, on the whole, it was as excellent a first book of verse as might be issued by any young Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate or, conceivably, by Shelley, Tennyson, or Swinburne in their undergraduate days. Indeed, critics and poets in England and in the United States, in reviewing Orion and Other Poems, noted the volume as a respectable performance in verse and a fair promise of excellent future poetry from the Dominion.

Roberts’ first volume Orion and Other Poems is a significant disclosure, both positively and negatively, of his essential genius and art. Positively, the bias or bend of his genius was towards English neo-classical idyllism and sensuous impressionism. Negatively, his genius lacked, and has continued to lack, original imagination or imaginative power. In his first volume, his ‘properties,’ to use a term borrowed from the stage and employed by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, are the same ‘properties’ as appear in the Keatsian idyll. In Roberts’ earliest verse masquerade mythical Greek deities and heroes, sylvan demi-gods and demi-goddesses, Arcadian denizens and shepherds, painted with rich sensuous color against a background of pastoral or idyllic landscape, to the accompaniment of impressionistic verbal music; alliteration, consonance, assonance, and vowel-harmony. All this is a recrudescence, unmistakably, of the same qualities in Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne. In short, Roberts appears as an unoriginal or unimaginative nature-and-figure-painter and verbal melodist. A single example from Orion will suffice:—

In that passage criticism at once notes that Roberts, as a very young poet, begins his professional career as a clever ‘word virtuoso.’ That passage certainly suggests, as no doubt it imitates, the sensuous impressionism of the Choric Song in Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters. Its verbal music carries the same kind of vague impressionism which we hear in the gossamer tone-painting of Debussy’s orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune. No one will doubt the sincere ambition of Roberts to be a poet, and the sincerity of his choice of themes and properties, diction, and poetic style. Yet, while noting the artificiality of it all, one does wonder that a tyro poet could, in a first volume of undergraduate verse, so consummately simulate, as Roberts did, the art of the supreme masters of English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism.

As yet, then, Roberts’ poetry discloses only talent in him, nothing of genius, or originality, or imagination. His poetry is, after all, a cleverly sublimated academic exercise. Literary psychologists cannot escape the feeling that Roberts deliberately ‘manufactured’ his first volume of verse—cannot help picturing the young poet diligently figuring away in his student’s cloister at the properties, forms and metres of his imitative idyllism and impressionism. It is all Artifice; all artificial. As yet in Roberts’ verse there is no ‘note’ of inspiration awakened by the magic and mystery of the great Dominion—no New World ‘note’ caught from Canadian Nature, or from Canadian romantic life and contemporary civilization.

In his second volume of poems, In Divers Tones, there is an advance in variety of inspiration, in his forms and metres, and in finish of technique. Still, on the whole, the themes and properties, rhythms, metres, and color are those of English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is, however, some suggestion of a change away from his former too imitative adherence to the subject, manner, and style of the English idyllists. There is, for instance, a suggestion of a structural, but not ethical, influence from Browning. There is, in this regard, a Browningesque coinage of unconventional or awkward diction, an adoption of a Browningesque metre and an introduction of ‘medley’ as when he inserts, after the Browning manner, a lyrical interlude, unexpectedly and with no logical justification, into the text of a broader, more serious movement and more ethically informed subject. His second volume of poetry, In Divers Tones, shows that Roberts has talent, but is still unimaginative and artificial. Yet his second volume is much more significant than his first, not by its being more various in its themes and forms, but by its exhibiting new tendencies in the bent of the poet’s mind and imagination. There is a tendency towards ethical influences and to get away from his early preoccupation with English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is also the merest show of a tendency to occupy his imagination with ideas of the Canadian ‘spirit’ and the beauty and wonder of Nature in Canada. There is, however, no distinctive embodiment of inspirational ideas or moods awakened by the Great Dominion or the New World.

Notwithstanding, in his second volume Roberts is taking his first step on the way to the expression of the essential form and manner of his creative genius as a poet. He was born to lilt, in simple lyrical and descriptive verse, the aesthetic sensations and the emotional nuances of Canadian life and external nature. In short, Roberts was born to become, as he did become, the most engaging and artistic, though not the first, native-born Canadian idyllist. In Divers Tones he first appears as a really significant creative Canadian poet. But whenever, in his later literary career, Roberts forsakes his light or simple idyllic and impressionistic treatment of Canadian life and external nature, as he forsakes it in the monody, in his poetry of city life, and in his poetry of modern eroticism, he may be engaging or arresting or impressive, but in nowise is he creatively significant.

In the same volume, In Divers Tones, Roberts exhibits two manners. In some poems in the volume he clings to his old manner of English Classical Impressionism. In other poems in the same volume he essays his new manner of Canadian Impressionism. The first is distinguished by overweighted sensuousness, by over-burdened luxurious color of descriptive epithet and verbal music. An impressive example is Off Pelorus, the sensuous quality of which may be suggested by the following single stanza:—

Roberts’ strictly Canadian Impressionism is colorful and musical, but the structure of the verse is simple, as, for instance, On the Creek, an idyllic lyric, full of Canadian color, and highly alliterative, beginning:—

Roberts developed other ‘manners’ or styles. But, unquestionably, this Canadian idyllic impressionism, simple in thought and form, yet colorful and musical, is his natural forte—his natural, characteristic manner. It is exemplified, in the same volume, by other Canadian idylls in the simple style of On the Creek, as, for instance, In The Afternoon, Salt, Winter Geraniums, Birch and Paddle; by distinct and deliberate suffusions of Canadian Nature in dactylic hexameters, as in The Tantramar Revisited, and in the sonnet-form (somewhat anticipating the nature-poetry of Lampman), as in Roberts’ genuinely noble sonnets The Sower, and The Potato Harvest.

We may turn now to a general consideration of Roberts’ poetic treatment of Nature. In Roberts’ first volume, in his strictly Arcadian poetry, there is nothing of Canadian Nature, nothing of Canadian scenery, nor the color and sentiment of Canadian life in the habitat of the distinctive Canadian spirit. In the second volume, In Divers Tones, there is a definitive engagement, on his part, with Canadian Nature, or with Canadian life and sentiment pictured against Canadian backgrounds; and also a change in the form and style of Roberts’ poetic composition.

The natural forms of Roberts’ art are light, simple, lyrical, and descriptive verse, which he treats with charming naturalness, almost naiveté, with simple tunefulness of ballad or folk rhythms, and which sometimes he delicately suffuses with a contemplative revery, a gentle melancholy, or a subdued sentimental reflection on the magic and mystery of Nature and life, somewhat in the manner of Herrick and Tennyson, and Longfellow. But Roberts’ lyrical idyllism or nature-description is not always wholly soft or sentimental, pretty, or gentle, or charming, nor is his new manner always in folk rhythm in form. At times, even when simple, his verse is picturesque, even brusque, vigorous, and overweighted with descriptive details as if, in the last matter, he must ‘paint in’ all the features and properties of Canadian Nature and leave nothing of its physiognomy to be added by the imagination of the reader.

Roberts, however, has one singular limitation, an innate defect of his genius. He cannot limn the human person or figure as one of the properties of his poetry of Canadian woodlands or pastoral scenery and life. In the matter of human portraiture against a background of Nature Roberts, as poet, is abstract and faltering in drawing, lifeless, unveracious, ineffective. Otherwise in the Canadian idyll or in nature-description he is concrete, veracious, simple but graphic, nearly always winningly musical and on the whole satisfying. In short, Roberts discloses in his new manner, in the Canadian idyll and his Acadian nature-poetry, the sure possession of the secrets of color, movement and music, and of real Canadian national sentiment, in the presence of life and nature. He is an adroit nature-colorist and verbal melodist.

Absent, however, from his genius and art are all gifts in spiritual portraiture and the fine and noble interpretation of Nature which Lampman discloses in his nature-poetry and his interpretation of the essential Canadian spirit from the embodiment of that spirit, as Lampman discerns it, in Nature in Canada.

Roberts’ treatment of Nature may be illustrated by examples taken from his second volume, In Divers Tones (1887), and from The Book of the Native (1896), in the latter of which are some poems that really belong, in form, and spirit, to the time when he was changing his abstract Arcadian manner to his concrete Acadian manner as in his In Divers Tones. Illustrative of Roberts’ change to a Canadian theme and to the modern simple method of treating Nature, in the pseudo-classical style, an apt example is The Tantramar Revisited, composed in the dactylic hexameter, a form, suggested, no doubt, by Longfellow’s pretty story of Evangeline. In this poem Roberts treats Canadian Nature with an impressive originality in properties, color, and sentiment, and certainly with a pervasive directness and veracity which prove his sincerity and which convince the reader that the poet was moved by the beauty and pathos of his Acadian subject:—

What a change in Roberts—this change from the abstract, artificial, academic, over-sensuous treatment of Nature in Arcadia to his direct, simple, concrete treatment of real nature in Acadia, with his poet’s eyes directly ‘on the object.’ There we have the real, the genuine Roberts, the original authentic poet of Canadian Nature and life and nationality.

For an example of his colored realism or idyllic naturalism tinged with a sort of Wordsworthian plainness or austerity of style and ethical revery, consider his sonnet The Sower. It has been called Roberts’ ‘popular masterpiece.’ As a sonnet, it is perfect in artistic structure, and is as faithful to Canadian Nature and sentiment as, say, Millet’s paintings, The Reapers and The Angelus, are true to French pastoral life and religious sentiment.

But this sonnet is a good example of Roberts’ ineffectiveness in human or spiritual portraiture. How effectively it pictures for us the land, the sky, the birds, the human properties of the Acadian landscape in Nova Scotia. The poem visualizes vividly for us all the features and elements of external Nature; yet it fails to visualize the Sower himself, to limn him effectively, graphically, impressively against the background of Nature as, on the other hand, Millet has graphically limned the human figures in his paintings against the French landscape.

Finally: a poem which is a really fine example of Roberts’ characteristic genius and art in the authentic Canadian idyll and in nature-description, and which, perhaps, contains his nearest approach to graphic figure-poetry, namely, his lyric The Solitary Woodsman, is specially noteworthy. Though published in The Book of the Native, it really belongs to the period of In Divers Tones when Roberts was changing over to his natural and characteristic manner of Canadian idyllic impressionism. For it is a gentle, natural, and simple lyrical idyll of Canadian Nature and life, tinged with a delicate mood of contemplation and pathos. A touch more of ‘personal detail,’ of moral characterization, would have made The Solitary Woodsman as universal and popular a portrait as the genre picture of the hardy, happy village blacksmith in Longfellow’s poem with that subject. Nevertheless, the poem has vigor, action, life-likeness; it is veracious and picturesque. In it Roberts is at his best in the Canadian lyrical idyll and in figure-portraiture.

Strict analysis of Roberts’ nature-poetry reveals both the positive qualities and the defects of his genius and art. As a poet of Nature in Acadia he hardly more than effects glimpses of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, colorful, no doubt, and tinged with a homely or even tender naturalistic sentiment. His pictures of Canadian scenery and pastoral life are indeterminate pastels of the general features of Nature in Canada rather than rich, broad paintings done with the forthright, broad brush-work of a master artist. It is all pretty, or charming, and faithful to Nature in Acadia. But it is all based on superficial observation and is devoid of poetic, that is to say, profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. It is not to be expected that the Canadian people will treasure these pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life. For though they be beautiful, simple, and realistic, the ethical element in them is always a reflection, a moral platitude, from the poet’s own moralizing, or a recrudescence of some older poets’ moralizings.

The public is quick to detect insincerity in a poet. While it would not be just to accuse Roberts of insincerity whenever he attempts to moralize in his nature-poetry, or to give it a moral or religious significance, it is still true that Roberts’ nature-poetry is too superficial, too obviously ‘an effort’ to make pretty or charming pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, too lacking in thoroughly humanized treatment of Nature, to be popular or cherished for its own sake by the Canadian people.

His pure lyrical pastels, as for instance, On the Creek, and The Solitary Woodsman, are more likely to remain permanently popular than are his Nature poems in other forms, as, for example, the genuinely important sonnet-sequence in his Songs of the Common Day (1893). In these sonnets, however, he shows no increase of descriptive power but only the variety of his word-painter’s palette. Moreover, in these sonnets there is a felt insincerity of aim. Though fine in structure, faithful to Canadian Nature, variously treating the aspects of Canadian Nature, and often sentimental and moralistic, they impress the reader as having been designed and written deliberately to show forth the poet’s powers in realistic or naturalistic impressionism, in the philosophical interpretation of Nature, and in technical artistry. Notwithstanding, it must be admitted that in these sonnets Roberts, as an impressionistic painter of Canadian Nature, is a master, and has his analogues, in the pictorial painting of Nature, in Corot and Millet, and in the tonal painting of Nature, in MacDowell and Debussy. These sonnets were consciously designed to be ‘works of art,’ and to impress the philosophically minded poets and critics of poetic form. Fine and masterful as they are in technical artistry, and impressive, too, with a resurgence of moral ideas, nevertheless they appeal neither to the popular heart nor to the philosophical imagination. For they create in the heart of the reader the sense only of a splendid achievement in poetic artistry, but never any sense of the poet’s own enrichment of life from his interpretation of beauty in Canadian Nature, civilization, and life.

Summarily: as an original Poet, Roberts’ forte is the treatment of Canadian Nature and pastoral life in impressionistic pastels, to an accompaniment of verbal music in folk rhythms or simple lyric forms. Thus accepted and appreciated he is a satisfying nature-colorist and melodist. But, impressive and magnificent, as he is, in more formal or larger poetic genres, as for instance, the sonnet and monody, he fails to give us in both a vital application of ideas to life.

Consideration of Roberts’ poetry of modern eroticism reveals only what has been called a variety of Roberts’ ‘ethical heterogeneity.’ This, however, is a defect in the man rather than in the poet, and only negatively affects Roberts’ significance in the literary history of Canada. Roberts’ work as a threnodist, romantic novelist, and inventor of a species of animal psychology in the romance is considered elsewhere. It is, however, as the inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature, both poetry and prose, rather than as a poet of Canadian Nationality and Nature, that Roberts has a right to a supremely significant status in the literary history of Canada.

The quotations from Charles G. D. Roberts’ works are found in the individual volumes mentioned in the text. There is also issued a collection entitled, Poems by Charles G. D. Roberts—New complete edition—(Copp, Clark Co., Toronto, 1907).

Archibald Lampman

In 1887 Charles G. D. Roberts had, with his poem beginning ‘O Child of Nations’ and again with his magniloquent Ode to the Canadian Confederacy, issued a ‘call’ to the Canadian people to realize a national consciousness and to achieve a national destiny. He appeared as the ‘Voice’ of Canada. But he was a mere ‘Voice.’ For aside from simply uttering the ‘call’ he did nothing else to awaken in the Canadian people a consciousness of their own native or national spirit and a love of country, except to publish some impressionistic word pictures of Canadian scenery and pastoral life.

Meanwhile Swinburne had told the world that out of Canada or Australia would come a great New Voice of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. In 1889, or two years after Roberts had trumpeted his ‘call’ to Canadians, Theodore Watts-Dunton, poet, novelist, and the most far-visioned of British critics then living, in an article on Canadian poetry made the same prophecy as had Swinburne. ‘Canada,’ he said, ‘had excellent poets, and with the development of a national consciousness of the history, resources and wealth of the country, would produce great poets.’ In 1918, or practically thirty years after the prophecies of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and the ‘call’ of Roberts, Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in an address on ‘Overseas Poetry,’ as he called it, before the Royal Colonial Institute, London, also confessed to a vision of great poets arising in Canada and said that, in his view, so far Canada had produced only ‘some good poets.’ It is probable that the prophecies of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton were merely generous pleasantries or, possibly, ‘guesses at the truth.’ In any case what they were really concerned about was the appearance of a great Imperial poet in Canada or some other one of the British Overseas Dominions.

What Canadians themselves should be concerned about is not whether Canada has produced a significant Imperial poet but whether the Dominion has produced a signally excellent poet who, if not the prophetic Voice of the Dominion, is the true Interpreter of the essential Canadian spirit.

When Sir Herbert Warren declared that Canada had produced only some good poets, he had in mind Roberts, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Valancy Crawford, W. H. Drummond, and Robert Service. But the greatest poet that Canada has produced, greatest as a nature-poet, and as an interpreter of the essential mind and heart of the Canadian people and country, is Archibald Lampman. If Lampman is not great in the sense that Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne is great, at least he is more than a good poet. He is a consummate artist. But more important, he is a subtle interpreter of the Canadian national spirit by way of a new and philosophical interpretation of Nature in Canada. He is par excellence the poet of Canadian Nature and Nationality.

For inductive proof of ‘nationality’ in literature, consider critically, and at some length, from Lampman’s poetry, an impressive example of wholly indigenous expression of the Canadian genius and the Canadian view of Nature and of Life. Justly it may be held that this example of interpretative nature-poetry by Lampman, which goes under the name of Sapphics, is, for faultless technic, for spiritual vision of Nature and for the beautiful application of noble ideas to life, an indubitable contribution to poetic art, and is peculiarly Canadian. This is not too high praise; for the poem itself, with analyses of its form and beauty, together with a commentary on its spiritual meaning, will furnish sufficient evidence that it must be given a unique place in Canadian Literature. For easy expository purposes the poem may be divided into three parts, which contain its three themes and their inspiration:—

The pure beauty of that poem, of its spiritual imagery, of its rhythmic flow and cadences, andante tranquillo, and the noble mood and emotion it induces—how it all affects the heart and imagination like music heard in dim cathedral aisles, or recalls us from the vulgar distractions of life to sequestered retreats in the Canadian wildwood, there to contemplate existence with a subdued joy and tender peace! Nay more, we rise from communing with the poet, as he did from his communion with Nature, anointed with a new spiritual grace and with a new strength to achieve, amidst ten thousand vicissitudes of fortune, a right worthy destiny—‘grandly ungrieving.’

Each of the three parts of the poem has its own theme and inspiration. The first section gives us the poet’s vision of Nature and of Nature’s own (as well as the poet’s) autumnal mood. This is an important distinction. It distinguishes a peculiar Canadian pictorializing and humanizing vision of Nature. Who can mistake in what land comes that autumn, ‘clothed in a splendor,’ and ‘beautifully sad and silent,’ in what land flourish those woods, ‘golden, rose-red,’ and in what land rise those hills, ‘full of divine remembrance’? Those are indisputably, unmistakably, Canadian woods and hills, in their precise autumnal garb and mood.

Some would contend that this way of pictorializing Nature is Grecian or even English. Rather is it peculiarly Canadian. It is so for this reason: The Greeks, as it were, ‘decked out’ Nature solely for the sensuous enjoyment of a world made lovely to look upon or pleasant to dwell in. The external beauty of Nature was with them, as with Keats and Wordsworth, when these two did not assume the moralizing attitude, the sufficient reason for their impressionistic word-painting. With Lampman, as with the Kelts (and Lampman was a Gael on his mother’s side), the physical loveliness of the face and garb of Nature is an essential, living aspect of earth. For does not Nature herself, as if conscious and reflective, change her aspect and garb becomingly with her seasons and moods? Lampman’s attitude to Nature is not the attitude of an impressionistic landscape painter, but of one for whom physical loveliness is supremely a spiritual revealment. This, however, might be wholly Keltic, and not Canadian. But it is Canadian, and not Keltic, because the interior revealment expresses a special view of Nature and a special mode of intimate communion between the Canadian heart and the spirit of Nature in Canadian woods and streams and hills.

Part second of the poem gives us an altogether novel and original spiritual interpretation of Nature’s mood and temper. It is a mood or temper, be it remarked, not expressed by Nature in any land save Canada, and not to be divined, and sympathized with, by any other racial genius save by the mind and heart indigenous to Canada, sensitive emotionally to the varying aspects and manner of Nature in Canada, as children to the meaning of changes in the facial expression and manner of a mother.

The uncritical, having in mind that inveterate sermonizer Wordsworth, may think that Lampman in this poem does but ‘moralize’ Nature. Far from it, Lampman ‘humanizes’ Nature in a peculiar way, namely, by reciprocal sympathy. We must mark that—‘reciprocal sympathy’—as an original Canadian contribution to the poetic interpretation, the spiritual revealment, of Nature. Lampman, as he says himself, is ‘brother’ to Nature. Her reflections on her own vicissitudes are as his own on his fortunes of life. The Poet and Nature, though two physically, are one by mutual bonds of sympathy. The poet sympathizes with Nature as he himself feels that she sympathizes with him. Thus does he humanize, not sentimentally, but nobly, the Canadian maples and birches, which, as he says:—

‘Yet they quail not’—there we have envisaged the mood and temper of Canadian Nature! The Gael, visioning the maples and birches, with his racial melancholy sentiment for glories departed, might say of them that they ‘dream, sad-limbed.’ But only a Canadian, or a Canadian Gael, apprehending, through sympathy, their inmost mood, could say of them, nobly, inimitably: ‘Yet they quail not.’ And so Lampman, divining, with a more than Keltic subtlety of vision, the spirit of the Canadian woods in autumn, sympathetically responds to their mood, and is heartened to endure, as they do, ‘silent and uncomplaining.’

‘Yet I will keep my spirit clear and valiant!’—Mark that as the authentic spiritual note of the Canadian genius. It is not Canadian, however, merely because it is the expression of indomitable courage and serenity, but because the idea, the inspiration, of a self-controlled destiny, achieved with clearness of vision and valiant heart, first comes to the mind and heart and moral imagination of the Canadian poet as a gift from Canadian woods. He, for his part, conveys that gift to his compatriots, by his poetic envisagement of the ‘brotherhood’ of Man and Nature in this land of glowing birches, noble elms and maples. That ‘note’ of clear-visioned faith and courage and serenity is in Canadian poetry of earlier days, long before the Confederacy, as well as in these days of social and commercial progress. It was in the poetry of Sangster and Mair in Ontario, and in the Gaelic verses of James MacGregor in Nova Scotia. But it is most articulate and vocal in the poetry of Archibald Lampman.

Considering now the first two parts of Lampman’s poem as a whole, we become aware that the first distinctively ‘national’ note in the literature of the Canadian Confederacy is a unique humanizing of Nature, singularly apparent in the Nature-poetry of Lampman—a sympathetic identity of mood and temper, a reciprocal sense of brotherhood, between Man and Nature. This is a psychological phenomenon by itself, belonging solely to the Canadian genius and expressing itself, with fine art, solely in Canadian poetry.

Like other poets, British and American, Canadian poets have notable pictorializing gifts, and can visualize a scene so vividly as to give a reader of their verse the intimate view of an eye-witness of the reality. They can, as aptly as Wordsworth, also moralize Nature and convey a noble preachment. But of them all Lampman stands alone in this—the power to humanize Nature into personality, and sympathetically identify her spirit with his own, in mood and will.

Lampman also stands alone in this—in his love of local beauty and his power to individualize and vitalize it. This, too, is a ‘national’ note and a psychological phenomenon by itself. His is not a love of Nature’s beauty abstracted from a particular time and place, but of those very scenes and haunts where first he beheld Nature in all her physical loveliness and many moods and became her intimate companion and lover. Lampman so individualizes and vitalizes his fields and woods, as Campbell his lakes, Roberts his woods and marshes, and Carman his tide and mists and April morns, that the reader can localize the region, and ‘time’ the season, of their inspiration with the nicest perception. So singularly is this quality present, most notably in poetry of Lampman, though also in the poetry of Roberts, Carman, Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott and Pauline Johnson, that a reader can, with absolute surety, say not only, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty,’ but also, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty in Nova Scotia, in New Brunswick, in Ontario.’ Surely, then, this peculiar imaginative interpretation of Canadian Nature whereby Lampman and his confrères, first, localize Nature, and, next, humanize her noblest mood and temper into an identity with their own is a supreme expression of the national spirit and raises Post-Confederation poetry to the dignity of authentic literature.

Canadians are, in the eyes of the older nations, a notably sane and happy people. They are so because they keep their souls, in the phrase of Lampman, always ‘clear and valiant,’ having, as Lampman, and even as Roberts and the other poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature, a sure vision of the greatness of their country’s destiny and of the means to it. The peculiar moral qualities of the Canadian people are an inviolable faith in themselves, an indomitable courage, and an imperturbable serenity. The ground and inspiration of these qualities are in Canadian woods and hills and waters, and Archibald Lampman, in his nature-poetry, interprets these qualities of the Canadian people and country with sweet reasonableness and genuine nobility.

In two of his finest sonnets, rich both in aesthetic and in spiritual beauty, and worthy both of Keats and Wordsworth, possibly suggesting the spirit of their finest sonnets, Lampman has summarized his poetic and philosophical creed. So beautiful in structure and imagery, so noble in their expression of the courage and serenity and faith which obtain in his Sapphics, and yet so wistful of the heavenly beauty and so infused with the pathos of life are these sonnets, that they move the soul and subdue the spirit with ‘thoughts too deep for tears.’ If there is any genuine meaning to Arnold’s conception of the moral dignity and spiritual function of poetry as ‘the profound and powerful application of ideas of life,’ these two sonnets by Lampman quite match the finest sonnets of the same degree of poetic vision by Keats, Wordsworth, and Arnold:—

Certainly these sonnets breath a higher spiritual air than do the finest sonnets of Roberts, as, for instance, The Sower and The Potato Harvest. As certainly, in sustained serenity and moral import, as well as in profound spiritual beauty, Lampman’s sonnet-sequence The Frogs surpasses Roberts’ sonnet-sequence in his Songs of the Common Day,—not only technically and in nature-color and music but also in transporting the spirit with inevitable ‘murmurs and glimpses of eternity’:—