Roberts’ treatment of Nature may be illustrated by examples taken from his second volume, _In Divers Tones_ (1887), and from _The Book of the Native_ (1896), in the latter of which are some poems that really belong, in form, and spirit, to the time when he was changing his abstract _Arcadian_ manner to his concrete _Acadian_ manner as in his _In Divers Tones_. Illustrative of Roberts’ change to a Canadian theme and to the modern simple method of treating Nature, in the pseudo-classical style, an apt example is _The Tantramar Revisited_, composed in the dactylic hexameter, a form, suggested, no doubt, by Longfellow’s pretty story of Evangeline. In this poem Roberts treats Canadian Nature with an impressive originality in properties, color, and sentiment, and certainly with a pervasive directness and veracity which prove his sincerity and which convince the reader that the poet was moved by the beauty and pathos of his Acadian subject:— Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture,— Old-time sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt! Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland,— Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see,— Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion, Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change. What a change in Roberts—this change from the abstract, artificial, academic, over-sensuous treatment of Nature in Arcadia to his direct, simple, concrete treatment of real nature in Acadia, with his poet’s eyes directly ‘on the object.’ There we have the real, the genuine Roberts, the original authentic poet of Canadian Nature and life and nationality. For an example of his colored realism or idyllic naturalism tinged with a sort of Wordsworthian plainness or austerity of style and ethical revery, consider his sonnet _The Sower_. It has been called Roberts’ ‘popular masterpiece.’ As a sonnet, it is perfect in artistic structure, and is as faithful to Canadian Nature and sentiment as, say, Millet’s paintings, _The Reapers_ and _The Angelus_, are true to French pastoral life and religious sentiment. But this sonnet is a good example of Roberts’ ineffectiveness in human or spiritual portraiture. How effectively it pictures for us the land, the sky, the birds, the human properties of the Acadian landscape in Nova Scotia. The poem visualizes vividly for us all the features and elements of external Nature; yet it fails to visualize the Sower _himself_, to limn him effectively, graphically, impressively against the background of Nature as, on the other hand, Millet has graphically limned the human figures in his paintings against the French landscape.