Within the opening years of the decade of 1860-70 were born Charles G. D. Roberts, William Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, George Frederick Scott (now Canon Scott), and another who, though bearing the same name, is only related to the Reverend Canon by the ties of poetic brotherhood, Duncan Campbell Scott. William Henry Drummond (known especially as "The Poet of the Habitant") and Isabella Valancy Crawford belonged to the preceding decade, and although ranked as Canadian poets, were born in Ireland, coming to the Dominion at an early age.
William Wilfred Campbell is the poet both of Nature and of human interests. No adequate view of an art so many-veined and so fine as his can be presented within the limited space of these pages, but from his noble poem on England this stanza is taken:
"And if ever the smoke of an alien gun
Should threaten her iron repose,
Shoulder to shoulder against the world.
Face to face with her foes,
Scot and Celt and Saxon are one
Where the Glory of England goes."
And this from The Hills and the Sea:
"Give me the uplands of purple,
The sweep of the vast world's rim,
Where the sun dips down, or the dawnings
Over the earth's edge swim,
With the days that are dead and the old earth-tales,
Human, and haunting, and grim."
A discerning critic says of Mr. Campbell that his poems are "something akin to the whisper of silence, the magic of moonlight, the sadness of art." Yet perhaps more than all one finds the tender human strain, as in The Last Prayer, of which these stanzas are representative:
"Master of life, the day is done;
My sun of life is sinking low;
I watch the hours slip one by one
And hark the night-wind and the snow.
* * * * * *
"And must thou banish all the hope,
The large horizon's eagle-swim,
The splendour of the far-off slope
That ran about the world's great rim,