Still further: it was Roberts’ two volumes of verse that first called the attention of the literary public in the United States and in England to the fact that _systematic_ literary activity was going on in Canada, and that first awakened critical curiosity about the new Canadian poets and their verse whenever a volume by Roberts or any of his poetic compatriots was published. Roberts’ renown obtained for the others a ready and just ‘hearing.’ This achieved, the quality of their verse, especially of their nature-poetry, brought them, it is fair to say, very favorable appreciation from the critics and poets of the United States and England. Finally: Roberts is related to the first systematic group of Canadian poets and prose writers, not only pragmatically as sponsor, inspirer, and leader: but also in a special way. He was the ‘Voice’ of the Canadian Confederacy. Seven years after the publication of his _Orion_, suddenly the Canadian people heard Roberts trumpeting a new song. In it there was nothing classical in theme, and nothing cold and correctly formal in artistic structure and finish. Roberts had changed from an Artist to a Prophet, from an Artificer in verse to a Voice—the Voice of one crying in the wilderness and trying to make straight the paths of the Canadian people. He was still a young man but he had been vouchsafed vision and he called magniloquently to his compatriots, thus:— O Child of Nations, giant-limbed, Who stand’st among the nations now Unheeded, unadorned, unhymned, With unanointed brow,— How long the ignoble sloth, how long The trust in greatness not thine own? Surely the lion’s brood is strong To front the world alone! He repeated his trumpeting to the Canadian to awake to a national consciousness of destiny and to achieve that destiny—he repeated the ‘call’ in language even more magniloquent—in his _Ode to the Canadian Confederacy_. Perhaps these were only ‘occasional’ poems, artificially inspired. At any rate Roberts’ Vision of Canadian nationality and his interest in expressing it forsook him. A few years after uttering the ‘Call’ he left his native Canadian habitat (in 1895) for New York. Yet in the fifteen years from 1880 to 1895 in the homeland, or till his removing to New York, by his own fine artistry and by the influence, at least of his example, on his contemporaries in Canada, Roberts was considerably, perhaps chiefly, potent in raising native Canadian poetry to a degree of technical finish that was never before reached or even attempted by native-born Canadian men and women of letters.