Again: they were the first native-born poets and prose writers to begin, under the Confederacy, a systematic literary career. The term ‘systematic’ defines their conspectus and aims. To this literary group the free and impassioned expression, in verse and prose, of beauty and truth, as beauty is in Nature in Canada and truth in Canadian thought, activities, and institutions, appeared as their own specific function and ideal life. They were thus the first Canadians consciously to undertake a literary career which should be, in its way and degree, commensurate with the growing spiritual, social, political, and commercial life of the Great Dominion, and to find their inspiration chiefly, if not wholly, in the natural beauty and sublimity of their homeland, and in the spiritual import of their country and of the lives of their compatriots. In short, their literary conspectus was thoroughly Canadian; and their inspiration and ideals, too, were Canadian. In fact, their inspiration and ideals were a moral necessity born of a loyal obedience to the same creative impulse that was active in other Canadians who also were bent on constructive achievement in other spheres of Canadian endeavor. Moreover: the literary group born in 1860, 1861, 1862, may be distinguished as having been the first Canadian poets and prose writers who, by actual performance, showed the nations, largely the peoples of the Motherland and the United States, that the political and commercially lusty young Confederacy was, on its own account, decidedly active in letters. The truth is that, in the decade following 1887, which witnessed the publication of the first work in verse and in prose by the systematic group of Canadian men and women of letters, Canadian poetry and imaginative prose, though they were derivative in form and frequently derivative in theme, quite gained the decent regard, and, in some instances, the admiration, of distinguished men of letters in England and in the United States, and furnished a pledge of greater achievement in literature. The Canadian poets and prose writers born in 1860, 1861, and 1862, distinguish themselves and the years in which they were born as the first systematically creative School and Period in the literary history of Canada. Their creative activities and their poetry and prose we have denominated as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. What is meant by the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature? In 1880 a young native-born Canadian, Charles G. D. Roberts, published a book of poems. The critics of England and the United States thought well of the verse. There was in it a quality that had not been in previous books of verse by native-born Canadians. The poems were marked by a certain noteworthy _artistic finish_ in the craftsmanship.