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:—
I
Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
But to stand free; to keep the mind at brood
On life’s deep meaning, nature’s altitude
Or loveliness, and time’s mysterious ways;
At every thought and deed to clear the haze
Out of our eyes, considering only this,
What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,