In truth, then, Pre-Confederation Canadian Literature was essentially a transplanted Old World literature. Inevitably it was alien to the soil of Canadian life, genius, and ideals. It, therefore, lacks real vitality, vigor, and truth. Except in Nova Scotia, in the time of Haliburton and Howe, it was the outcome of personal, not necessary social expression. But, after Confederation, expression of the spiritual and social needs of the Great Dominion became a national necessity. This expression, being born out of the spiritual and social needs of Canada, must be considered, however derivative the mere forms employed, as a genuine literary Renaissance. The period or movement begun by the systematic groups of poets and prose writers born in Canada in 1860, 1861, and 1862 may, then, properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. CHAPTER VII Charles G. D. Roberts ROBERTS SPONSOR TO LAMPMAN—LITERARY FATHER OF BLISS CARMAN— MASTER OF VERSE TECHNIQUE—FORMS OF HIS VERSE, AND ITS QUALITIES. Whether Charles G. D. Roberts had a genuine formative influence on Canadian literature, particularly Canadian poetry, or whether he should be regarded merely as ‘the eldest brother’ of the first systematic group of Canadian poets and prose writers may, possibly, be a moot question. Of a certainty he was the first native-born Canadian to take the leading role in making real and permanent, both by singular influences and by actual production in poetry and imaginative prose, a native and national literature in Canada. First: Roberts was the literary _sponsor_ of Archibald Lampman. In 1884, while editor of _The Week_, Roberts published in that periodical the very first poems which Lampman contributed to the public press (_The Coming of Winter_, and _Three-Flower Petals_). This is much more significant than appears on first view. It must be remembered that Roberts, though but twenty-four years old at the time of his editorship, had already published, in 1880, his _Orion and Other Poems_, which had been well received by the critical press in England and the United States. This distinction, abetted by his editorial connection with Goldwin Smith, the founder of _The Week_, gave him some of the glory of a new literary ‘star’ and made him an authority whose good opinion of another’s verse was very inspiring when it took the form of introducing a young unknown native poet to the Canadian public. In 1884 Lampman was a young man, human, sensitive, and shy. Roberts was the first to recognize Lampman’s authentic genius and the first to give him that practical encouragement which alone counts constructively—a first and right start, _per aspera_ indeed, but, for Lampman, _ad astra_.