Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Charles Mair Charles Mair is the first of our poets of the nature school. . . . . He might in many senses be called the first Canadian poet, as his first volume was published in 1868, one year following Confederation. 'Dreamland' was a small volume of one hundred and fifty pages, printed at the Citizen Printing House in Ottawa. The author was then in his thirtieth year. The thirty-three poems constitute the first attempt to deal with Canadian nature, in the manner of Keats and the other classic poets, and many of them in theme and treatment are similar to the verse of Lampman and Roberts And there are strong evidences in Mair's work that he influenced these poets to a great extent.—Wilfred Campbell, in the Ottawa 'Journai.' Charles Mair and Isabella Valancy Crawford, whose best work was written in the early SO's of last century, were the first to raise the standard of Canadian poetry to greatness, and it is doubtful if their work has since been outclassed by that of any successor.—'Public Health Journal.' AS Tecumseh—a drama, native to the soil, and still without a successful rival—was published in 1886, and as the same author, by the publication in 1868 of Dreamland and Other Poems, originated our nature school of verse, it seems clear that the poetical work of Charles Mair has a significance in Canadian literature, not yet fully recognized. Charles Mair, son of the late James Mair, a native of Scotland, one of the pioneers of the old square timber trade in the Ottawa valley, and Margaret (Holmes) Mair, was born in Lanark, Ontario, September, 1838. He was educated at the Perth Grammar School and at Queen's University, Kingston. In 1867, he returned to Queen's College and studied medicine. In the summer of 1868, he was called to Ottawa by the Hon. William Mc...