It would be a marvel if the Canadian colour and atmosphere did not produce a choir of singers, if not, indeed, a nation of poets. Nor can national poetic feeling be measurably restricted to the comparatively few greater poets in any land or literature; to the supreme masters in the lyric art. The greatness of Wordsworth, Landor, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, of the Brownings, Tennyson, and of Swinburne, does not detract from, even though it overshadows, the charm of a score of the lesser poets, each of whom has his individual place. Had the lives of Browning and Tennyson been of the comparatively brief duration of Stephen Phillips, how much of their noblest work would have been unwritten? Had not Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, with angelic goodness, rescued Francis Thompson from destitution, what might not the world of poetic literature have missed? It is not alone by the standard of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Petrarca that the art of poetry should be estimated. To no inconsiderable degree the number as well as the quality of the poets of a nation are typical of the national inspiration.
The fact that Canada, as a country that looks back to hardly more than a century and a half of organised life and whose literary expression has been almost entirely within the past half century, should have produced a body of poetry that has just claims to being considered national literature is as impressive as it is interesting.
"Has Canada a voice of her own in literature distinct from that of England?" questions Thomas Guthrie Marquis. "In Poetry, at least," he adds, "the Canadian note is clear and distinct, and of permanent value." There was little Canadian verse produced until well within the nineteenth century; and the first poem of real claim to distinction was the "Saul" of Charles Heavysege, published in 1857, a poem written "in the grand manner," the author presenting his ideas "with a dignity, austerity, and epic grandeur that are found in few poetic compositions." It was, however, with the decade of 1880-90 that the era of the modern and artistic poetic literature of Canada really opened, its keynote sounded by a poet, then hardly twenty years of age—Charles George Douglas Roberts—whose name has come to be widely known as that of one whose lips have been touched with the divine fire. His initial volume, Orion and Other Poems, revealed something in the quality that established his right to poetic rank. His very crudities, faults of construction inevitable to youthful ardour and inexperience, were still more suggestive of promise than higher technical excellence that might be recognised among contemporary verse. The classical tendency and temperamental assimilation were very obvious; the young man was evidently a devotee of Shelley and Tennyson; but he might easily have had worse masters. Six years later came his second volume of verse, In Divers Tones, that at once laid special claim on lovers of poetry; and when, in 1893, his Songs of the Common Day appeared, with its exquisite Ave, commemorating the centenary of Shelley, many people felt that a new star had arisen to shine with permanent splendour in the poetic firmament. There are lines and stanzas in the Ave that are worthy to hold their immortality so long as the art of poetry lives to bless and ennoble and inspire life. Shelley—
"the breathless child of change,
Urged ever by the soul's divine unrest."
And again:
"But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art."
And this stanza:
"Thyself the lark melodious in mid-heaven;
Thyself the Protean shape of chainless cloud.
Pregnant with elemental fire, and driven
Through deeps of quivering light, and darkness loud
With tempest, yet beneficent as prayer. "
And the breathing line:
"And speechless ecstasy of growing June,"