If we have regard for the historic process in all spiritual and social achievements, and ask: What was it that, on the psychological or spiritual side, brought about Responsible Government in the various Provinces that came to form the original Dominion of Canada, and What was it that brought about Confederation? we must answer that the people in the British North American Provinces were gradually coming to see themselves, their country, civilization, and institutions from the Canadian point of view, and were gradually expressing, with more and more of conscious fervor and power, in prose and poetry, their growing interest in and love of Canada and the Canadian point of view. The nativistic prose writers expressed the growing spirit of ‘Canada First,’ as in the writings of Haliburton and Howe, and also in the romances of Richardson, Rosanna Mullins, and Kirby. We turn to observe how the spirit of national ideals was gradually expressed in the work of the nativistic poets.

Nativistic poetry in Canada did not take form till the last year of the first quarter of the 19th century. In 1825 Oliver Goldsmith, a great-nephew of the author of The Deserted Village, published his idyll or descriptive poem, The Rising Village. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1781, and died at Liverpool, England, in 1861, after a long official service in his native country. The Rising Village, in substance or theme, aimed to describe the habitat, sufferings, achievements, and prospects of the Loyalist settlers. As regards its matter, therefore, the poem has the semblance of a genuine Canadian poem. But the form, the metre, rhythm, and rhyme, the diction and imagery, the characters and the settings, and even the ‘properties,’ are in slavish imitation of the elder Goldsmith’s idyll of ‘Sweet Auburn’ in Ireland. That is to say, the Nova Scotian’s Muse is not the Nova Scotian or the Canadian but the British Muse transplanted. Moreover, The Rising Village is to be distinguished from Howe’s Acadia in that Howe, though imitating the form and manner of the elder Goldsmith, expresses his love of his homeland, Nova Scotia, whereas the younger Goldsmith, though a Nova Scotian, fills his poem with an unpatriotic nostalgia. He loves the land where there is some ‘Sweet Auburn,’ not his native land which he describes as ‘bleak and desert.’ The nostalgia is real and pervasive—so much so that he removes to England and there dies. But since it is a poem of the habitat and experiences of the Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, and since it is correct in versification and is musical and possesses naturalistic truth, The Rising Village may be regarded as a genuine poem of documentary value, and as the beginning of Canadian nativistic poetry.

The strictly Canadian ‘note’ in nativistic poetry is first clearly heard in the verse of Charles Sangster. He was born near Kingston, Ontario, in 1822, and published The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems, in 1856, and Hesperus and Other Poems in 1860. The title poem of the first volume is in the Spenserian stanza as employed by Byron and is also otherwise imitative. But it is distinctly Canadian in its lyrical interludes, in which there is a poetic abandon, to the beauty and magic of Nature in Canada, as, for instance, in Sangster’s Lyric to the Isles, beginning:—

Here the spirit of Beauty keepeth

Jubilee for evermore;

Here the voice of Gladness leapeth,

Echoing from shore to shore

• • • •

Here the spirit of beauty dwelleth

In each palpitating tree,