Faulty as Sangster’s first poems are in versification and derivative in diction, we must mark his lyrical interludes, as in the foregoing example, as expressing a _new_ note, _the_ Canadian note in Canadian poetry. It is, however, a _nature_ note, not or hardly the _national_ note—clear and confident and strong. In Sangster’s second volume, _Hesperus and Other Poems_, published just seven years before Confederation, we hear the Canadian national note loudly vocal and inspiring. We catch it unmistakably in Sangster’s _Brock_—a really noble hymn to the memory of a national hero, who had ‘saved Canada’ for the Canadians, but a hymn that much more expresses the deeply felt unity of the Canadian people:— One voice, one people, one in heart And soul and feeling and desire. Relight the smouldering martial fire And sound the mute trumpet! Strike the lyre! The hero dead cannot expire: The dead still play their part. Raise high the monumental stone, A nation’s fealty is theirs, And we the rejoicing heirs, The honored sons of sires whose cares We take upon us unawares As freely as our own. We observe for the first time in Canadian poetry, the consciously felt sentiment of national unity—the first express utterance of the ideal of Canada and its people as a political and spiritual entity apart—in Sangster’s line, ‘A _nation’s_ fealty is theirs.’ Henceforth we shall often hear this distinction—Canada and its people as a _nation_—in the verse of Canadian poets. Sangster, then, is important as the poet who, in aesthetically and artistically respectable verse, first uttered, _consciously_ and clearly, in Canadian nativistic poetry the people’s sense of a national spirit and destiny. Again: Sangster, in _The Rapid_ and in _The Falls of Chaudière_, is the first nativistic poet to express in verse that close or intimate kinship with Nature which we discover much more profoundly expressed in the poetry of Roberts, Lampman, and Carman. Sangster utters this new naturalistic note in these authentically inspired lines from _The Falls of Chaudière_: I have laid my cheek to Nature’s, placed my puny hand in hers, Felt a kindred spirit warming all the life-blood of my face. _I have laid my cheek to Nature’s!_ We shall observe Lampman lay his cheek to Nature’s with more intimacy, with a more profound sense of spiritual companionship than Sangster. We shall note Carman ‘place his puny hand’ in Nature’s—and have Nature as Mother April ‘make him over’—with a far more intimate giving of self to the ‘heart of the world’ than Sangster. Nevertheless, we must remark Sangster’s priority—in spirit as well as in actual poetic production—in expressing that special and singular kinship with Nature which must be denoted as peculiarly Canadian. Still, in this respect, he is only the first forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott.