‘Yet I will keep my spirit clear and valiant!’—Mark that as the authentic _spiritual_ note of the Canadian genius. It is not Canadian, however, merely because it is the expression of indomitable courage and serenity, but because the idea, the inspiration, of a self-controlled destiny, achieved with clearness of vision and valiant heart, first comes to the mind and heart and moral imagination of the Canadian poet _as a gift from Canadian woods_. He, for his part, conveys that gift to his compatriots, by his poetic envisagement of the ‘brotherhood’ of Man and Nature in this land of glowing birches, noble elms and maples. That ‘note’ of clear-visioned faith and courage and serenity is in Canadian poetry of earlier days, long before the Confederacy, as well as in these days of social and commercial progress. It was in the poetry of Sangster and Mair in Ontario, and in the Gaelic verses of James MacGregor in Nova Scotia. But it is most articulate and vocal in the poetry of Archibald Lampman. Considering now the first two parts of Lampman’s poem as a whole, we become aware that the first distinctively ‘national’ note in the literature of the Canadian Confederacy is a unique humanizing of Nature, singularly apparent in the Nature-poetry of Lampman—a sympathetic identity of mood and temper, a reciprocal sense of brotherhood, between Man and Nature. This is a psychological phenomenon by itself, belonging solely to the Canadian genius and expressing itself, with fine art, solely in Canadian poetry. Like other poets, British and American, Canadian poets have notable pictorializing gifts, and can visualize a scene so vividly as to give a reader of their verse the intimate view of an eye-witness of the reality. They can, as aptly as Wordsworth, also moralize Nature and convey a noble preachment. But of them all Lampman stands alone in this—_the power to humanize Nature into personality, and sympathetically identify her spirit with his own, in mood and will_.