O land, by every gift of God Brave home of freedom, let thy sod Sacred with blood of hero sires, Spurn from its breast ignobler fires. Keep on these shores where beauty reigns, And vastness folds from peak to plains, With room for all from hills to sea, No shackled, helot tyranny. Spurn from thy breast the bigot lie, The smallness not of earth or sky. Breed all thy sons brave stalwart men, To meet the world as one to ten. Breed all thy daughters mothers true, Magic of that glad joy of you, Till liberties thy hills adorn As wide as thy wide fields of corn. • • • • And round earth’s rim thine honor glows, Unsullied as thy drifted snows. Wilfred Campbell, then, appears as a lyrist of Nature and poet of the Spirit, who is an adroit and vivid objective colorist and etcher, but who, for the most part, tinges his lyricism of Nature with meanings for the ‘inward soul.’ With equal dexterity and truth he painted an impressionistic or a _genre_ picture. But in doing this, he was unexcelled by his contemporaries in Canada in economy of means for expression. While, however, he was thus given to painting or delineating Nature in Canada, he also appears as a poet who ‘hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ He gave proof of this in a singular way. Whatever other distinctions belong to him, Campbell has never been equalled, by another Canadian poet, in the Dramatic Monologue. Perhaps, in view of the special meaning which Browning has given to this species of poetry, it were better to use the formula Dramatic Monody. For this phrase better describes Campbell’s poignant, compelling _Unabsolved_, _The Mother_, and _Lazarus_. But however categorized, these poems reveal the fact that Campbell’s genius was essentially dramatic. This dramatic instinct in him, Campbell developed to a high degree until he essayed the five-act poetic drama. It is as a Poetic Dramatist that Campbell achieved a distinct and fixed place in Canadian creative poetry. The first poet to attempt nativistic or native poetic drama in Canada was Charles Mair, who published at Toronto, in 1886. _Tecumseh: A Drama_. Many of its characters are Canadian and much of its setting and color are Canadian. Mair had created a work of real interest, of excellent structure and dramatic development, and had used impressively Canadian properties, character, and environment. The verse is genuinely artistic and colorful and dramatic, and the poem as a whole is worthy of critical consideration; but only as the first example of Canadian native poetic drama is _Tecumseh_ to be regarded as significant in the literary history of Canada.