"Has Canada a voice of her own in literature distinct from that of England?" questions Thomas Guthrie Marquis. "In Poetry, at least," he adds, {247} "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 {248} 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," condensing in itself all the rapture of summer hours; or the beautiful stanza: "O heart of fire, that fire might not consume! Forever glad the world because of thee; Because of thee forever eyes illume A more enchanted earth, a lovelier sea! O poignant voice of the desire of life, Piercing our lethargy, because thy call Aroused our spirits to a nobler strife Where base and sordid fall, Forever past the conflict and the pain More clearly beams the goal we shall attain!"