Some fair show of the fact of an authentic Canadian Literature may be evident from the following considerations. Let it be granted, as axiomatic, that verse and prose rise to the dignity of literature when they express and promote existence ideally—by delighting the aesthetic senses, by consoling the heart, by inspiring the moral imagination, by exalting or transporting the spirit. Judged by this four-fold test, the best Canadian poetry and imaginative prose will compare favorably with the admittedly authentic poetry and prose of many of the significant British and United States authors in the mid-Victorian era. In Canadian verse in English are genuine ‘gems’ of poetry, which, for vision, imagery, passion, lyrical eloquence, verbal music, and mastery of form and technique, are hardly, if at all, surpassed by the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne. If this is doubted, in part or in whole, then apply this concrete pragmatic test:—For exquisite tenderness and simple pathos: with Tennyson’s _Break, Break, Break_, compare Charles G. D. Roberts’ sweetly sad lyric, _Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea_. For delicacy or for poignancy in expressing the passion and meaning of love: with Swinburne’s _These Many Years_, compare Roberts’ _O Red Rose of Life_, or with Browning’s _Evelyn Hope_, compare Roberts’ _A Nocturne of Consecration_. For power to visualize the ghostly and ghastly: with Coleridge’s _The Ancient Mariner_ compare the vivid, uncanny pictures of a spectral ship and crew in Bliss Carman’s _Nancy’s Pride_. For beauty of descriptive imagery, verbal music, and expressive correspondence of emotion with the mood of the season in nature-poetry: with Keats’ _Ode to Autumn_, compare Archibald Lampman’s lovely lyric of earth, _September_. For dignity of thought and mastery of technic: with the finest sonnets of Wordsworth, compare Roberts’ _The Sower_, or those noble sonnets by Lampman, beginning, ‘Not to be conquered by these headlong days,’ ‘Come with thine unveiled worlds, O truth of Night,’ and ‘There is a beauty at the goal of life.’ For dramatic power in sounding the depths of elemental passion and emotion: with Tennyson’s _Rizpah_, compare Campbell’s profound utterance of the heart of woman in _The Mother_, or with the more subtle of Browning’s dramatic monologues compare Campbell’s psychological revealments in _Unabsolved_, and in _The Confession of Tama the Wise_. For the dainty, piquant expression of all those experiences which delight and console us in our humaner moments of reflection and reverie, let these pure lyrics be a daily rosary:—F. G. Scott’s _The Cripple_, _Van Risen_, and _A Reverie_; Campbell’s _The Hills and the Sea_, _Vapor and Blue_, and _Lake Huron_; Lampman’s _We, too, Shall Sleep_, _The Weaver_ and _The Passing of Autumn_; Carman’s _Spring Song_, commencing ‘Make me over, mother April,’ _The Ships of St. John_, and _The Grave Tree_; Roberts’ _The Lone Wharf_, _Lake