Whatever influences Keats may have had on Lampman’s art, it must be observed that fundamentally, as an artist and as an interpreter of Nature, with the power to add here and there graphic bits of human portraiture, Lampman is nearer to Gray than to Keats or even to Wordsworth. All these qualities are incisively exemplified in Lampman’s lyric _Heat_. In this poem Nature and pastoral life in Canada, on a day of sultry summer heat, are painted with the nicest realistic detail; and in it the bit of human portraiture, the wagoner ‘slowly slouching at his ease,’ is as graphic and as true to life as Gray’s bit of human portraiture, the plowman homeward plodding his weary way, is graphic and true to English pastoral and natural life. If any Canadian poet ever entered the sanctuaries of Nature and revealed the intimate observation and consummate artistry which marks the art of all the exquisite poets of Nature—that Canadian poet is Archibald Lampman. He is, however, a greater poet than he is an artist. As a poet he is the superior of Roberts. As an artist he has no superior save Duncan Campbell Scott. But as a poet of Nature, interpreting from Nature the essence of the Canadian spirit, Lampman is superb, supreme—unmatched, and even unrivalled by any other poet that Canada has yet produced. * * * * * The quotations from Archibald Lampman’s work in this chapter are from _The Collected Poems of Archibald Lampman_, edited, with a memoir by Duncan Campbell Scott—new edition, 1923 (Musson Book Co.: Toronto). CHAPTER IX Bliss Carman AS A WORLD-POET—CREATIVE MELODIST—PERIODS OF HIS POETRY—SINGING QUALITY AND ITS METHOD—LYRIST OF THE SEA AND OF LOVE—TREATMENT OF NATURE.