Nativistic poetry in Canada did not take form till the last year of the first quarter of the 19th century. In 1825 Oliver Goldsmith, a great-nephew of the author of _The Deserted Village_, published his idyll or descriptive poem, _The Rising Village_. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1781, and died at Liverpool, England, in 1861, after a long official service in his native country. _The Rising Village_, in substance or theme, aimed to describe the habitat, sufferings, achievements, and prospects of the Loyalist settlers. As regards its matter, therefore, the poem has the semblance of a genuine Canadian poem. But the form, the metre, rhythm, and rhyme, the diction and imagery, the characters and the settings, and even the ‘properties,’ are in slavish imitation of the elder Goldsmith’s idyll of ‘Sweet Auburn’ in Ireland. That is to say, the Nova Scotian’s Muse is not the Nova Scotian or the Canadian but the British Muse transplanted. Moreover, _The Rising Village_ is to be distinguished from Howe’s _Acadia_ in that Howe, though imitating the form and manner of the elder Goldsmith, expresses his love of his homeland, Nova Scotia, whereas the younger Goldsmith, though a Nova Scotian, fills his poem with an unpatriotic nostalgia. He loves the land where there is some ‘Sweet Auburn,’ not his native land which he describes as ‘bleak and desert.’ The nostalgia is real and pervasive—so much so that he removes to England and there dies. But since it is a poem of the habitat and experiences of the Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, and since it is correct in versification and is musical and possesses naturalistic truth, _The Rising Village_ may be regarded as a genuine poem of _documentary_ value, and as the beginning of Canadian nativistic poetry. The strictly Canadian ‘note’ in nativistic poetry is first clearly heard in the verse of Charles Sangster. He was born near Kingston, Ontario, in 1822, and published _The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems_, in 1856, and _Hesperus and Other Poems_ in 1860. The title poem of the first volume is in the Spenserian stanza as employed by Byron and is also otherwise imitative. But it is distinctly Canadian in its lyrical interludes, in which there is a poetic _abandon_, to the beauty and magic of Nature in Canada, as, for instance, in Sangster’s _Lyric to the Isles_, beginning:— Here the spirit of Beauty keepeth Jubilee for evermore; Here the voice of Gladness leapeth, Echoing from shore to shore • • • • Here the spirit of beauty dwelleth In each palpitating tree, In each amber wave that welleth From its home beneath the sea; In the moss upon the granite, In each calm, secluded bay, With the zephyr trains that fan it With their sweet breath all the day. On the waters, on the shore, Beauty dwelleth evermore.