Prelude to Poetry: Lampman and the
Rouge et Noir

by George Wicken

      In September 1879, Archibald Lampman entered Trinity College which, at that time, was located south of its present site in Toronto. Lampman's biographer, Carl Y. Connor, writes of Lampman arriving in Toronto from Cobourg and making "his way out Queen Street to the graceful Tudor buildings standing among the oaks and elms in their thirty or forty acres of grounds."1  At Trinity, Lampman served as editor of the college journal, the Rouge et Noir, and wrote both poetry and prose for that periodical. In fact, Lampman continued to make literary contributions to the Rouge et Noir and its successor, the Trinity University Review, for several years after his 1882 graduation from Trinity. All six of Lampman's prose contributions were published in the former journal. Barrie Davies brought three of these works to the attention of a large audience when he included them in his 1975 selection of Lampman's prose.2  In his introduction to the volume, Davies initiated the critical response to Lampman's Rouge et Noir he says. D. M. R. Bentley subsequently placed one of the essays, "The Revolt of Islam," in the context of Lampman's entire critical output.3  The Rouge et Noir prose, however, has not been examined in its entirety in spite of its considerable significance in the creative development of Archibald Lampman. The purpose of this article is to amend that situation by discussing all six of Lampman's Rouge et Noir essays chronologically, and by pointing to a major issue which the essays reveal: Lampman's struggle to define the poet's relationship to his society.

     The first of the essays, "The Revolt of Islam," is a study of Shelley; the essay appeared in the December 1880 issue of the Rouge et Noir. D. M. R. Bentley, pointing to the major critical tenets which Lampman articulates in this study, notes that Shelley's "magnificent dream" would have been congenial to Lampman's own "idealistic meliorism."4  There are indeed philosophical affinities between Shelley and Lampman, yet Lampman appears to be as intrigued with Shelley's life as he is with the Romantic poet's work. It is quite possible that Lampman culled the biographical data for this essay from Thomas Jefferson Hogg's 1858 study of Shelley.5  Lampman begins his essay with a lengthy examination of Shelley's persecution by those hostile to the writing of poetry:

What a delicate thing to be entrusted to this stern world's keeping is a poet's nature, a nature like Shelley's; gentle yet proud, boldly imaginative, deeply passionate, intensely sensitive, and ever striving to raise itself above the level of the world in its lofty aspirations. How easily it may be spoiled, embittered, and turned away from truth in an unaided struggle with the unsympathetic coldness and heartless oppression of society . . . . (SP, p. 11)

Apparently familiar with Mary Shelley'a account of the "aggravated miseries"6 endured by the young Shelley at Eton, Lampman writes: "He was exposed in his extreme youth to the cruelty of school fellows, who knew no sympathy with his proud sensitive heart . . . ." (SP, 11). Lampman maintains that Shelley continued to endure persecution at Oxford, and "even in after life, when the light of his burning genius had struggled into notice . . . he experienced . . . strange persecution and malevolent misrepresentation . . . ." (SP, p. 11). Lampman, seeing Shelley as a man whose creative talent isolates him from others, takes a passage out of context from "Queen Mab" and argues that it is derived from Shelley's own unhappiness among those who fail to understand his uniqueness:7

Ah! to the stranger soul, when first it peeps
From its new tenement, and looks abroad
For happiness and sympathy, how stern
And desolate a tract is this wide world! (SP, p. 11)

     Lampman goes on to endorse Walter Halliday's view that Shelley retreated into nature in order to escape those who did not share his sensitivity. In Halliday's opinion, Shelley "was not made to endure the rough and boisterous pastime at Eton, and his shy and gentle nature was glad to escape far away to muse over strange fancies, for his mind was reflective and teeming with deep thought."8  Lampman, who also made regular forays into nature, supports Halliday's view of Shelley:

Thus it was that in his earlier days he withdrew himself almost entirely from the society of those about him, and gave himself up to that wondrous study of nature, which as the reader learns from every page of his marvellous poetry, has made him one of her peculiar priests. (SP, p. 11)

Through his comments on Shelley, we are provided with one of the earliest records of Lampman's attitude towards nature. In describing nature as "wondrous," and by terming Shelley's nature poetry "marvellous," Lampman demonstrates that he is already aware of the spiritual and creative powers inherent in nature. Yet the nineteen year old college student does not consider the implications of a poet's withdrawing himself "almost entirely" from his fellow men in order to probe and celebrate the natural world.

     "Friendship," Lampman's second essay in the Rouge et Noir, was published in February 1881. The essay begins: 'Friendship, in the old heroic sense of the term', says Carlyle, 'No longer exists; it is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.' How true this is indeed." (SP, p. 17).9  Lampman's essay, with its sweeping view of mankind hardened and corrupted by materialism, owes much to Carlyle's Past and Present. Carlyle writes:

Are they [modern men] better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call 'happier'? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God's-Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so. Human faces gloom discordantly, disloyally on one another.10

In his Rouge et Noir essay, Lampman concurs with Carlyle's view of modern man:

Man's life runs evenly on from boyhood to old age: his aims are selfish: he is striving for wealth, or power, or fame . . . . Men feel not the necessity of friendship, and it springs up very tardily in their hearts. Gratitude is uncultivated; indeed it is a very age of ingratitude; for men, calm, and cold in the stiffness of the unendangered pursuit of their own selfish aims, in the stiffness of their hard, false pride, stoop not to receive kindness, and thus put themselves under obligation to others . . . . (SP, p. 17)

In an unwieldy sentence, Lampman considers the place of art in the evolution of civilization:

Where civilization, that restless march of the intellect over the ruins of the rude greatness of the past — glorious ruins, among whose flowers and mosses there has ever been such that is tender and beautiful, though their shattered fragments have been very nearly all borne away, like the great stones at Carnae, and built into some more modern specimen of cold symmetry — where this civilization wields an influence uninterrupted by these political storms, which bring with them long continued fear and doubt, and danger, true friendship, such friendship as prompts men who feel it to sacrifice advantage, property, even life, for those they love, is, in the ordinary positions in which men are placed, almost an impossible thing. (SP, p. 17)

This long and rambling sentence may be indicative of the confusion which Lampman is experiencing. He recognizes that the artist, aligned with that which is "tender and beautiful," is fortunate in being set apart from the "restless march" of society. Yet Lampman would exchange art for the friendship of a feudal society:

Those were ages of suffering, anxiety, and oppression; but yet a man possessed that one very great source of happiness — confidence in the faithful attachment of his friends . . . . In our time he has not the dangers and anxi eties of an age of feudal vassalage to bear up against, . . . but he has lost and can never know that most perfect happiness that rises out of faith in the attachment of those who would call themselves his friends. (SP, p. 18)

Lampman's college essays tend to manifest both an attraction and a repulsion for what might be termed the world of affairs. Lampman wishes to be an artist, and that requires separation from others; yet he needs the kin ship of other human beings, and that requires participation in the world of affairs. While Lampman tends to support the view that the world is well lost for the artist in "The Revolt of Islam," in "Friendship" he suggests that much in the world to be valued. When a man finds a friend, Lamp man entreats us, "let him cling to him as a drowning man clings to his rescuer, for if he lose that greatest of all blessings a mortal can have, he may never find another" (SP, p. 19).

     The merits of both fellowship and solitude are examined in Lampman's third Rouge et Noir essay. "College Days Among Ourselves" appeared in four instalments between February 1882 and February 1883.11  Written during Lampman's final year at Trinity, the article contains accounts of certain professors' eccentricities, and details of such student pranks as the "routing" (i.e. dumping) of unsuspecting freshmen from their beds in the middle of the night. Lampman was well known as a prankster at Trinity. A classmate, Archdeacon G. B. Sage, recalled many years later that Lampman was an "innocent looking youth" who "burst forth into one of the noisiest students in college and delighted to disturb the quiet of the academic halls after lights were turned off.''12   Such a portrait of Lampman also emerges in Connor's biography of the poet. One evening, according to Connor, Lampman and his friends hid in the attic of the college, just above the room of a Professor Boyes. Opening the trapdoor in the hall ceiling outside Boyes' room, Lampman proceeded to mimic Boyes' Somersetshire dialect:

The professor was also not ungifted as singer, and although he could only pick out a tune with one finger on his little melodion, he sometimes amuses himself by singing to that accompaniment. Accordingly the next number on the attic programme was Lampman's interpretation of the Boyesian rendition of "Wait till the clouds roll by, Jennie," accompanied by stifled snickers from above. Unable to stand it longer, the Professor rushed out, noted the empty rooms, and next morning there was a series of fines for the participants in the impromptu concert.13

Lampman's reputation as a prankster and mimic led to his being appointed "Scribe" or editor of the unpublished student magazine Episkopone. This magazine detailed the follies and foibles of college life, with a particular emphasis on the idiosyncrasies of the professors. Lampman read the magazine to his fellow students at a gathering in his room one Saturday evening in March 1881.14  The humorous incidents included in "College Days Among Ourselves" likely first found expression in Episkopone. The Rouge et Noir essay, however, also includes accounts of less raucous activities such as the pleasures of "long walks beyond the Humber" (CD, p. 6). Connor, too, makes reference to Lampman strolling westward from the Queen Street college "to the lake, the park and the Humber."15

     While the vignettes Lampman records have their basis in life at Trinity College, there is evidence in the conclusion of "College Days Among Ourselves" that the episodes have been selected and fashioned to portray an ideal version of college life. In later years, Lampman speculates, the graduate will recall "books read and discussed together, evening talks of ten prolonged into the small hours before a blazing grate in winter or by an open casement in the warm months of summer" and invest "Trinity's gray walls with a significance they had not, while he lived within them" (CD, p. 6). The "blazing grate" and "open casement" are, of course, poetic terms that enforce the idealization of college life. Moreover, the article is devoid of the unpleasantness Lampman had lamented in his two previous essays. He does not characterize a throng as hostile or insensitive, and he does not equate separation from others with loneliness. Rather, Lampman demon strates an early attempt to give artistic shape to human experience by lacing fellowship and solitude in an ideal relationship to one another. Most significantly, "College Days Among Ourselves" reveals the young poet to be formulating a major principle of his aesthetics: that memory is the source of happiness. Much of Lampman's later work celebrates the power of memory. In "Winter-Store," for example, the poet's recollections of summer sustain him through the bleak days of autumn and then through the starkness of winter:

And when the darker days shall come.
And the fields are white and dumb;
When our fires are half in vain
And the crystal starlight weaves
Mockeries of summer leaves,
Pictured on the icy pane;
When the high Aurora gleams
Far above the Arctic streams
Like a line of shifting spears
And the broad pine-circled meres
Glimmering in that spectral light,
Thunder through the northern night;
Then within the bolted door
I shall con my summer store;
Though the fences scarcely show
Black above the drifted snow,
Though the icy sweeping wind
Whistle in the empty tree
Safe within the sheltered mind
I shall feed on memory.16

In "College Days Among Ourselves" lies the nascent theory of the power of memory that will inform many of Lampman's poems. "The soul," Lampman was to write in "Happiness," is "stored with memories, a possession of which few of us sufficiently avail ourselves, or realize the value. It is in memory, the recollection of things adventitious or episodical, that our deepest and securest pleasures consist" (SP, p. 109).

     While "College Days Among Ourselves" reveals philosophical links between the work of Archibald Lampman the college student and Archibald Lampman the mature poet, not all of Lampman's Rouge et Noir essays are consistent with his later opinions on life and literature. In "Two Canadian Poets: A Lecture," written in 1891, Lampman maintains that Charles G.D. Roberts' patriotic poems are "heavy, pompous, [and] more of the tongue [than] the heart. The time has not come for the production of any genuine national song."17  Similarly, in his "At the Mermaid Inn" column of November 19, 1892, Lampman writes that "Roberts in his patriotic vein is a voice crying in the wilderness, and he seems to have set himself in a premeditated pose to cry there with all his might."18 Satire, Lampman believes, would be a more appropriate genre for the era because "the times can hardly carry patriotic verse. . . . "19  In disclaiming patriotic poetry, Lampman demonstrates a markedly different attitude from the one he had expressed in the fourth of his Rouge et Noir essays. "German Patriotic Poetry," published in March 1882,20 reveals Lampman to be extremely enthusiastic about the patriotic sentiments expressed in German verse. Lampman writes of having read such poetry21 and describes it as being composed of "rude and rugged words bearing in them little of the finish of art, yet revealing such an intense deep fervour and devotion as stirs strangely even the most disinterested listener" (GP, p. 4). Perhaps no statement in any of Lampman's Rouge et Noir essays captures the conflict between the world of art and the world of affairs more succinctly. To champion "rude and rugged words," even when one recognizes that they lack the refinement which poetry brings to language may reveal a reluctance on Lampman's part to commit himself wholly to art. In "Friendship," the tacit approval of a feudal society, in spite of its "dangers and anxieties" (SP, p. 18), demonstrates a similar confusion as to where a poet's allegiance should lie. Lampman seems to fear that being a poet will separate him from other men and prevent him from joining with them in common causes such as patriotism. That Lampman ultimately rejected patriotic poetry may indicate not only a change in his intellectual position on the matter, but the achievement of a more mature perception of the poet's relationship to his society.

     "Gambetta," published in July 1883, is the fifth of Lampman's Rouge et Noir essays.22  In recounting the life of Leon Gambetta, one of the founders of the Third French Republic, Lampman once again reveals considerable admiration for the spirit which can bind men together. In examining the years of political unrest in France, Lampman writes of a time when:

. . . two hundred and fifty-eight forges went clanging through the autumn days in all the open places of Paris, and shone lurid, gleaming with their sooty Vulcans about them through the long nights hammering musket barrels and tempering satires, hour by hour; when, to save time in bringing them down, the bells were shot from the steeples with heavy guns to make the patriots' cannon, and every cellar was raked to get them saltpetre, when all souls that could hold a musket gathered in the towns and villages and wended away to the battle-field chanting the Marseillaise . . . . (G, p. 6)

Chanting the Marseillaise, like repeating the "rude and rugged words" of patriotic poetry, involves a use of language that is extremely harsh. Lampman, himself, was later to acknowledge the ruggedness of the language in the Marseillaise. "Its note is inspired, fierce, aggressive" he writes in his "At the Mermaid Inn" column of May 7, 1892. "But like the military fervour that gave it birth its passion is too high to be maintained."23  The mature Lampman recognizes that a poet should strive to refine language and to exercise self-discipline in his writing. No such observations are present in "Gambetta." The young Lampman appears reticent to acknowledge that Marseillaise, though it ardently draws men together, falls short of the ideals a poet should pursue.

     "Hans Fingerhut's Frog Lesson" is the sixth and final prose contribution by Lampman to the Rouge et Noir. The essay appeared in February 1886, by which time Lampman was residing and working in Ottawa. The time span between this essay and the earlier Rouge et Noir articles may account for its more mature treatment of a familiar theme. "Hans Fingerhut's Frog Lesson" is an allegory in which Lampman deals with the role of the poet in society. Hans is a poet grown cynical through the failure of others to understand and appreciate him. Dissatisfied with his lot, Hans forsakes the poet's role and attempts to join the world of affairs: "in despair he broke his harp, rented a stall in the town, and became a tailor . . . ." (SP, p. 21). It is significant that Hans chooses the tailor's craft for, according to Carlyle, a tailor is "not only a Man, but something of a Creator or Divinity."24  Carlyle also writes of poets as "a species of Metaphorical Tailors" who "first made Gods for men; brought them down to us; and raised us up to them."25   Lampman may be inviting the reader to recognize that Hans is still a poet with an important calling, in spite of his temporary renunciation of poetry. Because Hans is denying his talent (symbolized by the breaking of his harp) there is a change in the quality of his language. The "melody in his soul" is thwarted, and it emerges in "chants so dreadful and ferocious that little children were afraid to pass his door" (SP, p. 21). Language, in the non-artist's world, becomes a chant just as it did for the patriot whom Lampman depicted chanting the Marseillaise in "Gambetta." The poet is not being true to himself when he allows his linguistic gifts to be perverted.

     Hans is "driven to distraction" (SP, p. 21) and leaves the company of other men to journey into nature. However, his unresolved conflict over his place in society causes nature to mock him:

Everything seemed to mock him as he walked; the blue sky and the fresh green earth, the song of the birds, the piping of the crickets and grasshoppers, the wind in the trees and the clink of the cow-bell, all so full of fair delight and contentment. The farther he went the fiercer he grew. He cursed the heavens and the earth and all happy and beautiful things in them. (SP, p. 22)

While in the natural world, an elf turns Hans into a frog and tells Hans that he can resume his role as a man only when he correctly interprets the song of the stream. In the testing of Hans by the elf, Lampman is attempting to define the ideal relationship between the poet and nature and between the poet and society. Hans offers three incorrect interpretations of the stream's song, all of them based on a misunderstanding of what it means to be a poet. His first interpretation hinges on his belief that since the frogs, gnats, and water hen are happy, the stream must be happy as well. He believes that the stream is saying: "All these things and many others are joyous; why should I be sad? Because everything is glad so am I glad" (SP, p. 24). Hans' interpretation denies individuality and is therefore wrong. The poet should not blindly follow the moods or incitements of others.

     Hans' second incorrect concluion regarding the stream's song involves his belief that the stream sings to avoid thinking about the torments it endures from reeds, cattle, and millers: "I have need to do something to keep my heart up against all these things. I sing gladly, therefore, as the weary weaver may sing to cheer himself at his loom" (SP, pp. 24-25). This interpretation is wrong because it sees singing (poetry) as a means of escaping unpleasantness rather than as a valuable endeavour in itself.

     In Hans' third unsuccessful attempt to explain the stream's song, he sees the stream as being neutral in terms of emotional power. "I sing," Hans believes the stream to say, "making beautiful, hopeless music. Those who imagine my songs to be joyous only think so because they themselves for the time are joyous" (SP, p. 25). This interpretation is incorrect for it implies that poetry has no innate power and cannot exert any influence on mankind.

     Having failed to interpret its song correctly, Hans sits by the stream and cries. As he weeps, his tears produce fairies who form a ring on the stream and sing the true song of the stream to Hans. Previously, Hans had "wept in silence" (SP, p. 24), but he now weeps openly. Through his tears, he demonstrates a kind of spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings — the Wordsworthian definition of poetry. Lampman appears to be supporting this conventional Romantic belief by showing that the correct version of the stream's song can be found, quite literally, within Hans himself. While Hans' incorrect interpretations of the song were expressed in prose, the rightful song is expressed, appropriately, in poetry. The song begins:

By silent forest and field and mossy stone
       We come from the wooded hill and we go to the sea;
We labor and sing sweet songs, but we never moan,
       For our mother the sea is calling us cheerily;
We have heard her calling us many and many a day,
From the cool grey stones and the white sand far away. (SP, p. 26)

From the song, Hans lead the poet, like an individual drop of water, is unique yet also part of a great sea of beauty and art. He must endeavour to reach that sea, even though its attainment is an impossibility. Prior to turning Hans back into a man, the elf tells him:

. . . everything in the world has something great and noble to strive to wards. You, too, Hans Fingerhut, gifted above most men, have your sea to seek without ceasing — a wondrous and absorbing sea of strength and beauty and peace. You can never come to it, but you can approach ever nearer and nearer. (SP, p. 27)

The belief that "everything in the world has something great and noble to strive towards" is also expressed in Lampman's "Happiness:" "Let each man find out what it is that nature specially intended him to do, and do it" (SP, p. 106). Furthermore, the elf's decree that Hans should strive for perfection, that his actions can influence the great sea's composition, foreshadows the mature Lampman's concept of perfect light and beauty which exist in the universe and towards which each individual can aspire. The final stanza of "The Largest Life" is, perhaps Lampman's most eloquent expres of this concept:

There is a beauty at the goal of life,
A beauty growing since the world began,
Through every age and race, through lapse and strife
Till the great human soul complete her span.
Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn,
The currents of blind passion that appall,
To listen and keep watch till we discern
The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all;
So to address our spirits to the height,
And so attune them to the valiant whole,
That the great light be clearer for our light,
And the great soul the stronger for our soul:
To have done this is to have lived, though fame
Remember us with no familiar named.26

Returning to "Hans Fingerhut's Frog Lesson," we can see that once Hans accepts that he is "gifted above most men" and that he has an ideal to pursue, there is a marked change in his relationship to others. Hans' return to the world of other men gives the reader the opportunity to see Lampman's vision of the ideal relationship between the poet and society being enacted. Hans is depicted walking among the birds, grasshoppers, and most significantly, the labourers going into the fields:

All these things no longer made Hans Fingerhut angry, but only seemed to him so many different versions of the stream song. They seemed to say to him, "Ah, Hans Fingerhut, you have changed and become like us again. We are all happy and peaceful, for we have all something noble and beautiful to work for. We long to hear you sing." (SP, p. 28)

The interdependence of the artist and the non-artist, what might be termed the social alignment of the Romantic poet, is a crucial aspect of high Victorianism. Lampman may have assimilated this concept through reading Carlyle, for Hans' view of the labourers, in particular, recalls the high value placed on labour in Sartor Resartus.27   In Canada, Duncan Campbell Scott became one of the most articulate exponents of the moral importance of labour.28  In Lampman's tale, Hans accepts the labourers' work as valuable and they, in turn, wish to hear him sing. The children, vho earlier avoided Hans' door, now come to hear his "glad, beautiful songs" (SP, p. 28). The songs are no longer chants, for Hans is no longer trying to emulate the language of other men; he has accepted his talent as unique.

     The Rouge et Noir essays reveal Archibald Lampman as an erudite and sensitive young man. Shelley's poetry, Carlyle's prose, poetry written in German, biography, and history were typical of the works being read by the aspiring poet during his college days. Admittedly, much of Lampman's prose is immature. Yet its very immaturity allows us to glimpse the unguarded Lampman: the Lampman who sympathizes with Shelley's withdrawal from society but who nevertheless cherishes the fellowship of other men; the Lampman who is moved by both "Queen Mab"and the "rude and rugged words" of patriotic poetry; and, above all, the Lampman who is struggling to define the poet's place in society. Through allegory, in "Hans Fingerhut's Frog Lesson," Lampman establishes the ideal definition of the relationship between the artist and other men to which he may have ad dressed himself before undertaking a career as a man of letters.

     Lampman's prose contributions to the Rouge et Noir serve as a prelude to his poetic career. The enthusiasm, the despair, and the struggle which are evident in these essays were part of a necessary stage through which Lampman had to pass on the way to becoming a mature writer. The essays are significant for the issues they raise about the young Lampman and, by implication, about the entire body of the poet's work.

Notes

    I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Henri Pilon, Archivist at Trinity College, for al lowing me to work with the Lampman material in the Rouge et Noir and the Trinity University Review.

  1. Carl Y. Connor, Archibald Lampman, Canadian Poet of Nature (1929; rpt. Ottawa: Borealis,1977) p.38.[back]

  2. Barrie Davies, ea., Archibald Lampman: Selected Prose (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1975). References to "The Revolt of Islam," "Friendship," "Hans Fingerhut's Frog Lesson," and "Happiness" will be drawn from this source, hereafter cited as SP.[back]

  3. D. M. R. Bentley, "Archibald Lampman on Poets and Poetry," Essays on Canadian Writing, No.9 (Winter 1977-78), pp. 12-25.[back]

  4. Bentley, p. 13.[back]

  5. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Moxon, 1858). Hogg, a friend of Shelley's, was commissioned by the Shelley family to write this biography. The book incorporates letters from Shelley's friends and relatives with Hogg's own recollections of the poet. Lampman appears to be familiar with Mary Shelley's account of her husband's persecution at Eton (quoted in Hogg, I, pp. 27-28), and with Walter Halliday's discussion of the young Shelley'a journeys into nature while at Eton (quoted in Hogg, I, pp. 49-46). Lampman's essay was written prior to the publication of two of the major nineteenth-century biographies of Shelley: those of Jeaffreson (1885) and Dowden (1886).[back]

  6. Quoted in Hogg I p. 27.[back]

  7. This view of "Queen Mab" may not be Lampman's own suggestion, but he nevertheless endorses the biographical interpretation of the passage.[back]

  8. Quoted in Hogg, I, pp. 43-44.[back]

  9. Although I have been unable to determine where Lampman found this passage, the view of friendship expressed in the quotation is consistent with Teufelsdrõckh's plaint in Sartar Resartus: "Towards this young warmhearted, strongheaded and wrongheaded Herr Towgood I was even near experiencing the now obsolete sentiment of Friendship. Yea, foolish Heathen that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I could have loved this man, and taken him to my bosom, and been his brother once and always. By degrees, however, I understood the new time, and its wants." See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1836; rpt. London: Chapman and Hall, 1910), p. 81.[back]

  10. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), p.5.[back]

  11. Archibald Lampman, "College Days Among Ourselves," Rouge et Noir, 3, No. 1 (February 1882), pp. 7-8; Rouge et Noir, 3, No. 2 (March 1882), pp. 6-7; Rouge et Noir, 3 No. 4 (November 1882), pp. 4-5; Rouge et Noir, 4, No. 2 (February 1883), pp. 5-6. All quotations are from the final instalment, hereafter cited as CD.[back]

  12. D. M. R. Bentley, "Archibald Lampman as I Knew him at Trinity University,' by Archdeacon G. B. Sage (with a Prefatory Note by D. M. R. Bentley)," Canadian Notes and Queries; No. 18 (December 1976), p.8.[back]

  13. Connor, pp. 48-49.[back]

  14. Connor, p. 52.[back]

  15. Connor, p. 53.[back]

  16. Duncan Campbell Scott, ct., The Poems of Archibald Lampman (1900; rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 171.[back]

  17. Archibald Lampman, "Two Canadian Poets: A Lecture", in Masks of Poetry, ed. A. J. M. Smith (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), p.38.[back]

  18. At the Mermaid Inn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 194.[back]

  19. At the Mermaid Inn, p. 194.[back]

  20. Archibald Lampman, "German Patriotic Poetry," Rouge et Noir, 3, No. 2 (March 1882), pp. 4-6. Quotations are drawn from this source, hereafter cited as GP.[back]

  21. German was one of the six languages Lampman studied at Trinity. The other five were English, French, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.[back]

  22. Archibald Lampman, "Gambetta," Rouge et Noir, 4, No. 5 (July 1883), pp. 5-10. Quotations are drawn from this source, hereafter cited as G. Lampman may have read Hanlon's 1881 biography of Gambetta or some of the earlier volumes of Reinach's works on Gambetta. Reinach's work was still in progress, however, when Lampman wrote his essay.[back]

  23. At the Mermaid Inn, p.69. [back]

  24. Sartor Resartus, p. 201. [back]

  25. Sartor Resartus, p. 201.[back]

  26. Scott, ed., p. 301.[back]

  27. On the cover of Heuschrecke's Tract in Sartor Resartus is written: "Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. . . . For in thee too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacement of Labour . . . ." See Sartor Resartus, p. 157.[back]

  28. In the title poem of Labour and the Angel, Scott writes:
    "Effort and effort," she [the Angel] cries,
    "This is the heart-beat of life,
    Up with the lark and the dew,
    Still with the dew and the stare,
    Fad it athrob in the earth."
    When labor is counselled by lore,
    You may see her splendid, serene,
    Bending and brooding above,
    With the justice and power of her mien
    Where thought has its passionate birth,
    Her smile is the sweetest renown,
    For the stroke and the derring-do,
    Her crown is the starriest crown.

See Duncan Campbell Scott, Labor and the Angel (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1898), p. 2. [back]