To have done this is to have lived, though fame
Remembers us with no familiar name.
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’:—
And slowly as we heard you, day by day,
The stillness of enchanted reveries
Bound brain and spirit with half-closèd eyes,
In some divine sweet wonder-dream astray;
To us no sorrow or upreared dismay
Nor any discord come, but evermore
The voices of mankind, the outer roar,