When Sir Herbert Warren declared that Canada had produced only some good poets, he had in mind Roberts, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Valancy Crawford, W. H. Drummond, and Robert Service. But the greatest poet that Canada has produced, greatest as a nature-poet, and as an interpreter of the essential mind and heart of the Canadian people and country, is Archibald Lampman. If Lampman is not great in the sense that Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne is great, at least he is more than a good poet. He is a consummate artist. But more important, he is a subtle interpreter of the Canadian national spirit by way of a new and philosophical interpretation of Nature in Canada. He is _par excellence_ the poet of Canadian Nature and Nationality. For inductive proof of ‘nationality’ in literature, consider critically, and at some length, from Lampman’s poetry, an impressive example of wholly indigenous expression of the Canadian genius and the Canadian view of Nature and of Life. Justly it may be held that this example of interpretative nature-poetry by Lampman, which goes under the name of _Sapphics_, is, for faultless technic, for spiritual vision of Nature and for the beautiful application of noble ideas to life, an indubitable contribution to poetic art, and is peculiarly Canadian. This is not too high praise; for the poem itself, with analyses of its form and beauty, together with a commentary on its spiritual meaning, will furnish sufficient evidence that it must be given a unique place in Canadian Literature. For easy expository purposes the poem may be divided into three parts, which contain its three themes and their inspiration:— I Clothed in splendor, beautifully sad and silent, Comes the autumn over the woods and highlands, Golden, rose-red, full of divine remembrance, Full of foreboding. Soon the maples, soon will the glowing birches, Stripped of all that summer and love had dowered them, Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure Ruthlessly scattered: Yet they quail not; Winter, with wind and iron, Comes and finds them silent and uncomplaining, Finds them tameless, beautiful still and gracious, Gravely enduring. II Me, too, changes, bitter and full of evil, Dream by dream have plundered and left me naked, Gray with sorrow. Even the days before me Fade into twilight, Mute and barren. Yet will I keep my spirit Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless, Grandly ungrieving. III Brief the span is, counting the years of mortals, Strange and sad; it passes and then the bright earth, Careless mother, gleaming with gold and azure, Lovely with blossoms—