During the pre-Confederation period, Canada’s popularity as a destination for tourists seeking picturesque and sublime scenery grew as a result of various literary and transportational factors. At the turn of the nineteenth century, such works as Isaac Weld’s Travels through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1799) and George Heriot’s Travels through the Canadas, Containing a Description of the Picturesque Scenery on Some of the Rivers and Lakes (1807) stimulated a touristic appetite among the British and American middle and upper classes that few cared to satisfy on account of the high costs and acute discomforts of travel to, from, and in Canada. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, however, travel to Canada’s most spectacular and popular tourist destination, Niagara Falls, became much easier and more affordable for tourists, and in the ensuing decades sight-seeing in central and eastern Canada was further encouraged by improvements to Canadian canals and roads, the advent of railways and steam-powered cruise boats, the retreat into the distant past of the War of Independence and the War of 1812, and the publication of a host of travel books and articles, including Anna Jameson’s very influential Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) and W. H. Bartlett and N. P. Willis’s seductively beckoning Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1842). In 1851, a steamer service down the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay was inaugurated to cater to the demand fostered by George Warburton’s Hochelaga (1846), George Lanman’s A Tour to the River Saguenay, in Lower Canada (1848) and similar books, and by one of the biggest tourist attractions in the eastern United States and Canada between 1849 and 1854: William Burr’s "Moving Panorama" or "Seven Mile Mirror" of the waterways between Niagara Falls and the upper reaches of the Saguenay (see Arrington). By Confederation, American tourism to Canada was well on its way to being the major industry that it is today.

At least two poets writing in pre-Confederation Canada were quick to recognize American tourism as a potential source of readers and sales. In the year of the opening of the Erie Canal, James Lynn Alexander’s Wonders of the West, or, a Day at the Falls of Niagara, in 1825, a Poem (1825) provided tourists with a sentimental romance set among the sublime and historical sights of the Niagara region (see St. Jean 5-17) and, three years after its author had travelled down the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay, Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) drew on Lanman and Burr to offer tourists a similar medley of romance, scenery, and history (see Bentley, Mimic Fires 204-05). The better to cater to American tourists, Sangster had his poem printed and copyrighted in the United States and "[n]eatly bound in Muslin, and uniform with the American editions of the Poets" (qtd. in Bentley, "Introduction," The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay xlvii). Moreover, as early as 1862 Sangster began augmenting The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay with a view to publishing a second edition that would be even more appealing to American tourists, a project that he again took up between 1888 and 1891, when, as he told W.D. Lighthall, he had more than doubled the length of the poem with a view to collaborating with his "nephew Amos W. Sangster," a Buffalo "painter and Engraver" who was then "issuing the last number of an illustrated work on the Niagara," on a "goodly sized book, with…descriptive notes…on the Thousand Islands and the downward route generally as far as Ha! Ha! Bay" on the Saguenay (qtd. in Bentley, "Introduction" xliv). The very fact that Sangster was contemplating such a grandiose project in the late ’eighties and early ’nineties attests, not only to the continuation of touristic interest in Canada among monied Americans, but also to the continuing role that poetry was playing in the Canadian tourist industry in the post-Confederation period. In 1888, Charles G.D. Roberts told Lighthall that he "hardly regard[ed] Sangster and [him]self as in the same boat" as writers (Collected Letters 88), but clearly he and other Confederation poets, especially William Wilfred Campbell, shared with the author of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay an awareness of the potential advantages of using their poetry in tourist guides aimed partly or primarily at readers outside Canada.

The most ambitious, important, and controversial guide to Canada in the post-Confederation period was Picturesque Canada: the Country as It Was and Is, a lavishly illustrated collection of essays on different parts of the country that was published in thirty-six installments and as a two-volume set in 1882-1884. "[A] business venture of two Americans, the Belden Brothers of Chicago, Howard Raymond and Reuben Booth," Picturesque Canada was modelled less on Canadian Scenery Illustrated, as Archibald MacMechan suggests (Head-Waters 107) on Picturesque America, or the Land We Live In (1872-74), a highly successful series and set edited by the eminent American poet William Cullen Bryant (Reid, "Lucius Richard O’Brien" 794). As its general editor, Raymond and Booth chose George Monro Grant, the philosophical principal of Queen’s University whose Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872 had appeared in 1873 and, as a result of the high demand born of its timeliness and readability, had gone to second and third revised editions in 1877 and 1879 (a fourth followed in 1925). As its artistic director, they chose Lucius O’Brien, the first president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts who had "dominated the academy’s first exhibition…in Ottawa in…1880" with Sunrise on the Saguenay (1880), a large canvas "in a manner similar to that employed by the American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt" (Reid 794). Very clearly, Raymond and Booth wanted Picturesque Canada to appeal to audiences on both sides of the border—to patriotic Canadians as well as to American tourists. Shrewdly, they arranged for it to be published under the imprint of Belden Brothers, but in Toronto.

Both the contents and the reception of Picturesque Canada were marked by this attempt to please two quite different audiences. As initially promoted, it was to have been illustrated entirely by Canadian artists, but, in the event, more than seventy-five percent of its five hundred and forty illustrations were by the American artists who had worked on Picturesque America—a fact that may have generated a comforting sense of familiarity among potential American tourists but certainly provoked a "bitter" public response from Canadian patriots (Reid 794). Much of this controversy swirled around O’Brien, who had not only overseen the illustration of the work but produced the bulk of the remaining illustrations himself, including some superb depictions of the scenery of the Great Lakes and British Columbia. Nor was the financial security and artistic inspiration that O’Brien derived from Picturesque Canada (Reid 794) without far-reaching consequences either for Canadian national art or for the relationship between Canadian artists and the tourist industry. Partly as a result of his work on Picturesque Canada, O’Brien was commissioned to do illustrations for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883 and, in 1886, "[w]hen the officers of the…Railway decided to send artists west on their newly completed line…in order to promote the mountains as a tourist destination, [he] naturally was the first to be invited" (Reid 795). Several of the products of O’Brien’s work for the C.P.R. in the late ’eighties such as Cloud Capped Towers (1886), Through the Rocky Mountains, a Pass on the Canadian Highway (1887), and A British Columbia Forest (1888) "caught the imagination of Canadians" because they depicted the nation as a "newly accessible resource" of sublime scenery and "boundless national wealth" (Reid 795). By the early ’nineties, "O’Brien’s style and method [were] so well known that any extended observations of his work" seemed unnecessary to Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott (At the Mermaid Inn 57). It is an indication of O’Brien’s range and stature as a national artist in the post-Confederation period that the paintings mutely admired by Lampman and Scott at the Academy exhibition in 1892 included Grand Falls on the River St. John (New Brunswick) and The Mill Pond at Blair (Ontario).

From a literary and patriotic stand-point, George Monro Grant was well-chosen as the general editor of Picturesque Canada. As well as being "[a] well-written travel book," his account of the 1872 survey for the railway to British Columbia in Ocean to Ocean "celebrates the possibilities of the new country" and, as D.B. Mack observes, "did much to promote interest in the northwest and to generate political support for the railway" (405). If the "Introductory" chapter in Ocean to Ocean is implicitly nationalistic in its imperialism ("[b]y uniting together, the British Provinces…declared that their destiny was—not to ripen and drip, one by one, into the arms of the Republic—but to work out their future as an integral and important part of the grandest Empire in the world" [(1879) 23]), its concluding chapter is a passionate statement of the "morally driven patriotism [that] is evident throughout Picturesque Canada" (Mack 407). Resonantly entitled "Our Country," it canvasses the usual three political options available to Canada—independence, imperial consolidation, and annexation to the United States—and then adopts the tones of the Presbyterian Church that Grant had helped to become a national institution in 1875 to utter a prophesy and a prayer: "[a] grand future beckons us as a people onward. To reach it, God grant us purity and faith, deliverance from the lust of personal aggrandizement, unity, and invincible steadfastness of purpose" ([1879] 356). As he makes clear in the Preface to Picturesque Canada, Grant envisaged the project as a stimulus to patriotism more than tourism: "being in sympathy with Canadian aspirations and knowing Canada from ocean to ocean, I believed that a work that would represent its characteristic scenery and the history and life of its people would not only make us better known to ourselves and to strangers, but would also stimulate national sentiment and contribute to the rightful development of the nation. The favour with which the work has been received is due not merely to its artistic merit, but to the growing patriotic spirit of the people" (1:iii). "[S]trangers" planning to make first-hand acquaintance with "scenery and…history" represented in Picturesque Canada could be assured of encountering people with a growing sense of national pride such as that evinced by Joseph Edmund Collins hin his lavish praise of the work as "a triumph of artistic skill" in Canada under the Administration of Lourd Lorne (1884): "Canada now enjoys the credit of being able to produce the higher class of artistic work in a manner that has outrivalled any other enterprise of this kind on the continent, Picturesque Canada, but being barbarous in artistic merit in comparison. The country, therefore, is under obligation to...Messrs. Belden...for having demonstrated to us that, with adequate energy, capital and skill at her hand, Canada need not be behind her most conspicuous rivals" (360, and see also "Picturesque Canada" and "A Great Work on Canada").

As intimated by its subtitle—Canada as It Was and Is—each section of Picturesque Canada focuses on both the past and the present condition of the particular region to which it is devoted, providing the reader with descriptions and illustrations of local history, scenery, folklore, industry, and recreation. Largely typical of its genre is the section on New Brunswick that Roberts probably began in the fall of 1881 and completed in the summer of 1883, when his enthusiasm for Canadian "Independence" was either at or near its peak (see Collected Letters 27-28, 31, 34). Prefaced by engravings of Grand Falls and St. John, "New Brunswick" begins with an account of natural resources that can "only be gathered by the strenuous effort which breeds a sturdy and determined race" and then proceeds to a tour of the province that alternates descriptions of its physical features with vignettes from its Acadian and British history (2:741-42). Like the accompanying engravings of such scenes as the "Wharf at St. Andrews," the "Restigouche River, from Prospect Hill," in Bathurst, and "Poling Up and Paddling Down" by Melicite Indians, Roberts’s essay emphasizes the commercial, aesthetic, and recreational features of New Brunswick and suggests that all are readily accessible either by water or on the Intercolonial Railway, which Sandford Fleming had declared ready for traffic on July 1, 1876. As with the other sections of Picturesque Canada, the message is clear: New Brunswick is a picturesque and prosperous part of Canada that has much to offer residents and visitors alike, especially those who are not averse to a little "strenuous effort."

Where Roberts’s essay is somewhat atypical is in its extensive poetic components. Matthew Arnold, Robert Buchanan, and other poets are mentioned or quoted in several places; the Native legend that Roberts would versify in "The Departing of Gluskâp" (1886) is briefly summarized and credited both "with the wild, impressive beauty of Celtic legend" and with being the "Melicite ‘Passing of Arthur’" (2:780); and the view "from the cupola of the university" in Fredericton is rendered as a prospect piece complete with foreground, middle-ground, and a metaphorical background that anticipates "Tantramar Revisited," not least in its discreetly erotic geography: "th[e] valley is for the most part pale-green, save where the river draws a broad ribbon of azure round the gleaming city disappearing under the shoulder of the uplands to our right, and where a square of rich saffron colour tells us of the yet unharvested grain" (2:767). Yielding to the temptation of self-promotion with understandable modesty, Roberts quotes his own sonnet "To Fredericton in May-Time" (1881) anonymously but nevertheless in its entirety, thus setting a perilous precedent for the markedly less restrained ego of William Wilfred Campbell. Some of the other sections of Picturesque Canada, notably those of accomplished poets and critics such as Agnes Maule Machar and Graham Mercer Adam, contain similar poetic components, but none puts poetry at the service of travel-writing to quite the same extent as "New Brunswick." In Roberts’s essay an alliance is forged between poetry, patriotism, and tourism that recalls the poems of Alexander and Sangster even while it anticipates the well-known involvement of members of the Group of Seven, particularly A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer, with the publicity programmes of the C.P.R. and the C.N.R. (see Hill 176-78, 188-91).

Nor was Roberts unaware of the financial rewards to be gleaned from aligning his writing skills with the advertising campaigns of Canada’s railways. In a letter of October 9, 1885 to Samuel Edward Dawson, he tried to interest the Montreal bookseller and publisher in a manuscript entitled "‘Birch and Paddle, or canoe-cruises in [the] trout and salmon waters of New Brunswick,’" a "guidebook" for which he thought "[t]here would be a good sale…both in N.B. and in the States," particularly if "the N[ew] B[runswick] R[ailway], and I[nter-] C[olonial] R[ailway]…[could] be induced to take some copies to use as ads. It should make, I think, about a dollar a book" (Collected Letters 55). Nothing came of this proposal, and Roberts apparently abandoned the scheme for a guidebook until the early ’nineties, when he wrote a Canadian Guide-Book for the New York publisher of his translation of Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s The Canadians of Old (1890). Part of his motivation for reviving the project was to finance an escape from the "fetters" of domesticity and the "yokes" of other commitments (Collected Letters 140). "[T]he desire for wandering has been strong upon me," he told Bliss Carman on January 31, 1892, "[w]hat sayest thou if we plan for a break and a dash at the beginning of July. …[W]e could strike right across the continent for the Rockies, Vancouver, Japan!"

I could doubtless work the C.P.R. for my passes, and so couldst thou by making arrangements for newspaper correspondence. I also should arrange for like correspondence. This would help funds. …Further, might we not…arrange with some good publisher to do together a book on the trip? something popular, saleable, and at the same time worth doing, careful and serious. In part a traveller’s companion on the C.P.R. from London to Japan and the ‘bond of Empire’ idea used also, giving the work something of an imperialistic significance. My idea is a combination of [John Askew] Roberts’ [Gossiping] Guide [to Wales], [Augustus William] Hare’s Walks about Florence, and [James Anthony] Froude’s "West Indies travels and observations." By confining ourselves to a direct main line, like the C.P.R., we should avoid the masses of guide-book detail and digression that would so hamper a book of the sort,—and much might be relegated to appendices. We should thus, too, secure the C.P.R.’s friendliest help and support throughout. Such a book, done well, would be no discredit! And it would sell in England, Canada, and U.S.A. What think?? (Collected Letters 140)

As this letter makes clear, Roberts had a sophisticated understanding of the guide-book genre and its literary, political, and commercial possibilities in the 1890s, when the C.P.R. and other railways had begun to appreciate the promotional value of literary as well as artistic representations of the scenery along their routes. The fact that Roberts’s scheme did not materialize may reflect Carman’s lack of enthusiasm (his response, if any, has not survived), but seems as likely to have been the result of a combination of professional and domestic responsibilities, coupled with the sudden and shattering death of Roberts’s younger brother, Goodridge Bliss Roberts, on February 4, 1892. Roberts would not be able to engineer his escape to New York until February 1897.

In the two tourist guides that Roberts did write or co-author in the early 1890s—The Canadian Guide-Book. The Tourist’s and Sportsman’s Guide to Eastern Canada and Newfoundland (1891; 2nd ed. 1892) and The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither (1895) —he both strengthened the alliance among poetry, patriotism, and tourism forged in "New Brunswick" and augmented it with features designed to appeal specifically to American and, to a much lesser extent, British tourists. Like other guidebooks aimed at English-speaking tourists and sportsmen, the first of these, co-authored with Ernest Ingersoll, was published both in the United States (by Appleton in 1891) and in Britain (by William Heinemann in c.1892), and several times reprinted and up-dated. Modelled on "the famous Baedeker Handbooks" (2),¹ it draws heavily on Picturesque Canada but tempers the outspoken nationalism of Grant’s work with various accommodating gestures towards Americans: the people of Canada are "engrossed in the work of nation-building," Roberts explains in his Introduction, but the climate of the Maritimes and the St. Lawrence region is "not unlike that of New England," and when visiting the Acadian coast of Nova Scotia "the tourist will [presumably have]…an open volume of ‘Evangeline’ in his hand, or at least…a copy of Longfellow in his pocket" (1,2,254). Just in case this is not so, Roberts includes a lengthy quotation from Evangeline in the text of The Canadian Guide-Book and excerpts a long passage from Picturesque Canada to remind readers of Longfellow’s treatment of Hiawatha as ‘"the Hercules of Ojibway mythology’" (38).²

Probably because he had more space to fill and more material upon which to draw, Roberts is much more generous in The Canadian Guide-Book than in Picturesque Canada with quotations from his own work. Now in the versified form of "The Departing of Gluskâp" (1886) the "Melicite Passing of Arthur" is here (157-58) as, under the title of "Menagwes," is "The Vengeance of Gluskâp," a poem not published elsewhere until 1894 (see Collected Poems 479). "To Fredericton in May-Time" is not included, perhaps because "Blomidon," a recently written sonnet that refers to Longfellow as a "tender singer" whose "song…crowns" the fame of Evangeline (Collected Poems 128), seemed more appropriate to the primarily American audience of The Canadian Guide-Book. In the portion of the book devoted to Quebec, Roberts quotes only his own translation of de Gaspé’s "Quebec, 1757" (1890) and gives a fellow Maritimer, the Reverend Matthew Richey Knight of Halifax, a moment of secular glory by quoting his sonnet on "Jacques Cartier" (1887). Less eccentric is the choice of the sestet of Archibald Lampman’s "The City" (1888) and five stanzas of his "Between the Rapids" (1888) to give poetic resonance to Ottawa and the journey downriver to Montreal. By quoting Thomas Moore’s "Canadian Boat Song" (1806) on the approach to Montreal, Roberts merely confirms his alignment with a tradition of poetic tourism that stretches back in Canada through Sangster,³ Warburton, Basil Hall and numerous others to Moore himself (see Bentley, Mimic Fires 83-85)—a tradition that would have been familiar to his American readers, not only in Bryant’s Picturesque America and its successors, but also in the many volumes of Longfellow’s Poems of Places (1876-1879).

Since much of the sightseeing that Roberts rehearses in The Canadian Guide-Book, particularly in the sections devoted to the Maritimes, occurs during or after railway journeys, it is scarcely surprising that the advertisements at the end of the book include one for the C.P.R. and two for "The ‘Land of Evangeline’ Route" of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway. While the C.P.R. advertisement is very general ("If you are going to Canada, the Eastern Provinces, the Upper Lakes, the Western Provinces, over the Rockies, to the Pacific Coast, to Japan and China, or Around the World, you can do so with comfort and satisfaction by travelling via this Great Railway…" and so on), the one for the Windsor and Annapolis Railway is predictably much more specific and literary. Touting "The ‘Land of Evangeline’ Route" as "the beau-idéal of the Tourist’s Road [with] the best and most recent improvements—steel rails, air-brakes, new rolling stock— making travel a luxury, through scenes over which LONGFELLOW lavished the splendors of his imaginative genius," it invites tourists to "[b]uy a volume of Longfellow, or look up the nearest Tourist Agency; or, better still, take a trip to Nova Scotia" and travel with the Windsor and Annapolis Railway over the "ground where the love-tragedy of EVANGELINE was woven in Fate’s shuttle" and past the "scenes made so real and familiar in the work of the greatest American Poet." "Through the car-windows the enchanted traveler[s]" will see both the villages and the landscapes of Evangeline (Grand Pré, the Gaspereaux River, the Basin of Minas, and "Blomidon crouch[ing] in lonely grandeur keeping WATCH…over the point of embarkation, from which the Acadian exiles saw with streaming eyes the last of their old homes") and, at Windsor and Halifax, they will "all…visit the home of immortal ‘Sam Slick,’ known at his own fireside as Judge Haliburton" as well as a variety of other sites such as King’s College, Fort Edward, and the Citadel. Did Roberts supply the copy for all or part of this and, if so, did he do so before or after writing "Blomidon"? The answers may never be known, but in their very asking the questions are indicative of the symbiotic relationship that sometimes existed between Canadian poetry and the tourist industry during the Confederation period.

A further aspect of that relationship comes into view when, between listing the literary and historical landmarks of Nova Scotia and mentioning the "Splendid Steamships Running in Connection to and from Boston and St. John, N.B.," the advertisements for "The ‘Land of Evangeline’ Route" assure "Health-seekers…that in travelling BY THE WINDSOR AND ANNAPOLIS RAILWAY they are in one of the best climates on the footstool, where the air is the only medicine required to keep you fresh as paint." More obviously than Roberts’s reference to the "invigorating climate" (1) of Canada in the Introduction to The Canadian Guide-Book, this insistence on the medicinal properties of the Nova Scotia climate reveals the extent to which Canadian vacations were sold to late nineteenth-century Americans as a cure for the nervous and physical ailments that were widely believed to be caused by the impact on sensitive people of life in a modern city and, thus, to be especially prevalent among the middle and upper classes of New York, Chicago, and other conurbations in the American northeast. If, as Dr. George Miller Beard had argued in American Nervousness, its Causes and Consequences (1881), "modern civilization" was the "predisposing cause" of all the psychosomatic symptoms ascribed to "neurasthenia" or "Americanitis" (98-99), then a restful time away from modern civilization in a park, at a cottage, or in Canada should return the sufferer, at least temporarily, to health. As argued elsewhere, the Vagabondia volumes of Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey (1894-1901) are partly a product of the American "mind-cure" movement, as are many other works of the Confederation poets, including several of the nature lyrics of Lampman’s Among the Millet, and Other Poems (1888) and the animal stories that Roberts began to publish in book form shortly before he moved to New York in 1897 and came to view after the turn of the century as a temporary source of freedom, "refreshment and renewal" for those trapped in "the world of shop-worn utilities and…the mean tenement of self" (Kindred of the Wild 29; see also Bentley, "Carman and Mind Cure" and "Unclouded by Sophistries"). Since escape from "modern civilization," whether on a vacation or by means of a book, would provide relief from "Americanitis, "[h]ealth-seekers" could expect to be doubly refreshed and renewed by a trip to Nova Scotia with Evangeline, Longfellow, or, at least, The Canadian Guide-Book in hand or pocket.

While the therapeutic aspect of a trip to Canada is more acknowledged than emphasized in The Canadian Guide-Book, it is given a prominent place in the guide to Nova Scotia that Roberts wrote for the successor to the Windsor and Annapolis Railway in the winter of 1894-95 (see Collected Letters 188-91).⁴ On the inside front cover of The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither, an advertisement for the Dominion Atlantic Railway proclaims "EVANGELINE’S LAND. . .the wonderland of artists, the sportsman’s paradise, [and] the healthiest spot on the footstool"—a thrice-blessed destination for people who "have a care for [their] pocket, health and time…love scenery, variety and comfort…[and] want to see the land that poets, romancists and artists have made their own." In the opening paragraphs of his Introduction, Roberts continues in the same vein and with his eye very much on urban and upper-echelon Americans: "[t]he tourist…escaping to the cool atmosphere [of Nova Scotia] from the tropic fervors of Washington Street or Broadway" will find much to enjoy in landscapes rich in "the heritage of a romantic and mysterious past" and bathed in the "transfiguring glow" of Longfellow’s "imaginings" (1). Of special medicinal value for Americans suffering the consequences of the monotony, cacophony, and pollution of cities such as New York is scenery that is by turns stimulating and relaxing ("austere grandeur alternates with softest loveliness, …the wilding piquancy of untrained Nature with the rich peacefulness of well-tilled farms") and, more than this, "good air"— air that is "tonic and temperate, guiltless of malaria, ignorant of hay-fever, friendly to work, to play, to sleep, to appetite. It touches to content the o’er-wrought nerves, and fills with healing breath the troubled lungs" (2). As the words "good," "guiltless," and "ignorant" in this description suggest, Nova Scotia is more than merely a sanatorium for neurasthenic Americans in The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither; it is an earthly "paradise" within easy reach of the polluted pandemoniums of the industrial northeast on the steamer and trains of the Dominion Atlantic Railway.⁵

What makes Nova Scotia especially attractive to native and visiting writers and artists is the combination of its abundant and fresh (not to say unfallen) subject-matter and the psychological and perceptual qualities of its air: "here is material rich and unwrought waiting for [the writer’s] pen—landscape, legend, and tradition; and in the wholesome air thought runs clear and the brain is capable. …[And] the great tides, the wide marshes, the vast red gaping channels, supply subjects [for the artist] which are new both in line and colour; and the moisture in the bland air gives ‘atmosphere’ to soften all harsh edges" (2). Farfetched as they may seem, such ideas were probably taken very seriously by Carman, Hovey, Henrietta Russell and the other writers and artists who came from New York in the summers of 1892 and 1893 to stay with Roberts in Windsor (see Collected Letters 152, 176). Indeed, the therapeutic emphasis of The Land of Evangeline and the Gateway Thither could well have been inspired by Hovey’s future wife and directed at people like her.⁶ "Mrs. Henrietta Russell, of New York, the famous Delsartian teacher and society leader, expects to come on a camping expedition to Windsor…with a small party of friends and pupils," Roberts told Lorin Ellis Baker, the President of the Yarmouth (Nova Scotia) Steamship Company,⁷ on July 15, 1893, "and I write to ask if you will extend to Mrs. Russell personally…the courtesy of a pass, both ways,—and of special attention on the journey! All Mrs. Russell’s movements will be attentively chronicled in Boston and N.Y. papers and she has a very wide influence among society and travelling classes in America. …It is my own persuasion that is bringing her and her party this way; but it will be easy to secure her influence in the future, toward inducing tourists of her class to visit this part of the world" (Collected Letters 176). That Henrietta Russell did not camp again in Nova Scotia after the summer of 1893 probably had more to do with the impecuniousness that Roberts’s letter nicely conceals than with any discourtesy shown to her either in transit or in Windsor.

A country of the deadliest arctic cold, and of the fiercest tropical heat, with numerous delightful climates in between—this is the country called Canada. And of a similar strange mixture are its people, at once the saddest-fated and yet most promising of any people upon earth. …Canada promises either to be the theatre of one of the greatest national entities earth has ever seen, or else, failing this, to be the spot where the race has died out in a crude, vulgar cosmopolitanism, where patriotism has been destroyed by a decadent party system, and all idealism crushed out in a hard materialism. (1-2)

The "race" to which Campbell refers is the British race and the "idealism" that he sees under threat resides in the rural population of northern European and, especially, northern British descent that has made Canada the "Scotland of America" and may yet succeed "in establishing as strong and as elevated a civilisation on this continent as Britain has in the old" (2, 11). In attributing the "northern" qualities that are "needful to make a people really great" to both "climate" and "heredity" (4), Campbell aligns himself with a tradition of thinking about Canada as an extension of northern (British) virtues and an alternative to southern (American) vices that, of course, received one of its earliest and most influential formulations in R.G. Haliburton’s characterization of Canadians as "the Northmen of the New World" (8) in The Men of the North and Their Place in History (1869). As Berger observes, Campbell "spoke for all imperialists" when he told the Empire Club in Toronto in November 1904 that Canada’s only choice lay "between two different imperialisms, that of Britain and that of the Imperial Commonwealth to the south" (Selected Poetry and Essays 178).

Campbell’s intense imperialism touches almost every aspect of Canada, dictating both his likes and his dislikes. Apparently, the oak has the most beautiful foliage of all Canadian trees because it is "emblematic of the…national character" of the "English people" (132) and "narrow theoretical nationalists" of the literary persuasion must be made to recognize that "genius" knows no national boundaries, that the "two most famous Canadian poems [are] Evangeline and Hiawatha," and that "most of [Canada’s] writers have had a special interest in the rich civilisations of the past," particularly those of their British countries of origin (50-52). As consistent with such assumptions and arguments as Campbell’s preference for W.H. Drummond, "the gifted author of The Habitant" (85) over any other contemporary Canadian poet (Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott are not so much as mentioned in Canada)¹⁰ is his fondness for the work of writers who shared his imperialist sentiments: "[t]hat gifted Celtic-Canadian statesman and poet," Thomas D’Arcy McGee (20), those "large and noble" prophets of "Imperial federation," Joseph Howe and Thomas Chandler Haliburton (30-37), and "the true poet [and]…fine artist" whose verse contains "[t]he finest pen-portraits" of Quebec City and its environs, "the Duke of Argyll…[who] as Marquis of Lorne…was Governor General of Canada" from 1878 to 1883 (63-68). After quoting several "splendid," "rare," "delightful," "delicate," "beautiful," and "exquisite" passages from Lord Lorne’s poems, Campbell marvels sycophantically that, although "Canada has produced many writers who have described her natural and historic glories, and…splendid resources," it was "one of her Governors-General who was the first to picture her historic fort [Quebec] in…fine classic verse" (68).

Just how completely Campbell’s descriptions of Canada and its people are coloured by his imperialism is shown by part of his account of "the most representative Canadian city":

When one hears [Toronto’s] myriad church-bells ring on a Sabbath morning, giving it the air of an old English Cathedral town, it will scarcely be realised that here on the week-days exists the unrest and the fever of a people over-much American, in their absorption in the world of finance and the awful business of stock-gambling and other material interests, the too close application to which is bringing about a marked deterioration in our Canadian manhood. Nor would one, who has witnessed the intense loyalty to British institutions shown by the citizens of…Toronto, and their strong appreciation of the necessity of the Imperial spirit and of the development of the Empire, realise without surprise that this city has long been the residence of that distinguished historian, essayist, and master of English, Goldwin Smith, whose life-dream for many years in the past was to bring about the annexation of the Dominion to the United States. Mr. Smith has, however, of late admitted his mistake. …His residence, The Grange, is…a typical English manor-house [that] stands in the centre of a small but English-looking park. …He is a delightful and dignified host quite after the aristocratic and old-time manner. (157-58)

Believing, perhaps on the basis of Smith’s disapproval of the imperialistic activities of the United States in 1898-1904,¹¹ that he has abandoned his belief in continental union, Campbell makes him a parabolic figure in Canada—a reformed sinner safely and admirably ensconced in his imperial heritage.

Even with the expectation that a guidebook by a poet will contain more of its author’s poetry than modesty might sanction, The Canadian Lake Region comes as a surprise. Not only is the book prefaced by a Campbell poem (as was Canada) but so also are most of its ten chapters, and quotations from Lake Lyrics and Other Poems are so frequent that the reader comes fully to accept his contention that "there is no portion of the globe more fit" than "the lake region of Canada" for "the mood and dream of the poet and lover of nature" (14-15). Even Lord Lorne is allowed to intrude only briefly on Campbell’s poetic territory with his "fine sonnet" on "Niagara," and then only to suggest the inadequacy of "‘A universe of waters thundering down / Across the awful verges of the world’" as a description of the Falls (60-62). As an exercise in self-promotion, The Canadian Lake Region forecasts Campbell’s Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), where twenty-four pages of his poems, many of them on imperialistic themes, appear as the biggest jewel in the crown of Canadian poetry.

As any reader of Canada might expect, Campbell’s bow in the direction of Lord Lorne is part of the imperialistic message of The Canadian Lake Region as a whole. "Summer and winter, autumn and spring, the influence of this great lake is for the strengthening of our character," he writes of Lake Huron in his chapter on Georgian Bay; "[n]ext to the mountains and sea of our ancient mother, Britain, no cradle for the rearing of a great people could be more fitting than the shores of this vast lake. All that spirit of the sea-faring soul, the daring of the navigator, the love of the open, the search for adventure, is here met and satisfied" (113). After this the reader must suspect that there are imperialistic as well as geographical reasons for Campbell’s reluctance to "include Michigan in a series of essays on the Canadian Lake region" (115). Lake Michigan is "off the main track of the great waterway from the St. Lawrence to the Canadian West" and, moreover, "it has no present personality as a lake beyond its size, …its place on the map in the great chain of lakes" and "the fact that it has two huge cities, Chicago, the American capital of the middle west, and Milwaukee, for its…ports. …Yet there is no Canadian lake which has a more interesting history, and the past of Canada and the early discovery and exploration of the West would be incomplete without the story of this remarkable and beautiful body of water" (115-16). It is to be regretted that "[t]he Lake Michigan of to-day is out of the domain of the Canadian people" and that the "greatest northern emporium" of "modern materialism" has arisen on its southern shore, but it can nevertheless be appreciated by Canadian "thinker[s] and lover[s] of the true and beautiful…and [by] worshipper[s] of the noble in humanity" for its role in the early history of Canada and its "associat[ion] with a prehistoric people, who worshipped God in the universe" (134).

As his remarks on Lake Huron and Lake Michigan suggest, Campbell conceives of the Great Lakes as a region whose natural amenities, historical associations, and spiritual resonances will continue to exercise a positive influence on Canadians as individuals and on Canada as a nation within the Empire. Besides being "forever associated with the names and deeds of the Ulysses, Aeneases, and Argonauts of early Canada, the Great Lakes reveal "vestiges of an ancient people beyond the memory of the aborigine, the evidence of a mysterious race¹²…[and] an earlier civilization. Thus are the[y]…clothed in an ideal atmosphere of history, heroic personality and adventure, and veiled in…mystery" (16-17). For these as well as natural reasons, the Great Lakes have potent spiritual and therapeutic properties: "the breezes which blow over [Lake Huron’s] mighty breast are those which tone the soul to high endeavour, or woo the worn or jaded spirit to nature’s langor, her mediciner toward her divine purpose," and the region as a whole is "an Eden" "for the very air is full of a vigor and life-giving essence, and the nights cool, dry and restful, with brooding repose for jaded nerve and care-wracked brain. Here man can, if he sanely chooses, renew his life for a season, and forget that he is a serf or a hireling" (20-23). Of course, Campbell was not alone in making such claims for "the Canadian Lake region" but merely one of a chorus of writers whose advocacy of the therapeutic benefits of a season away from the "awful business" of the modern city, be it New York, Chicago, or Toronto, led to the construction of the countless summer cottages that now line almost every lake in Canada and the United States.

But, finally, Campbell’s advice to "our men of action and…the practicalities of life" to "spend a week or a month every summer somewhere on the shores of the…great lakes, away from the jar and jangle, the vulgar jostle of the crowded money-marts" (29), arose from the conviction that time thus spent had more than merely medicinal value. In "open" spaces away from the "stifling purlieus of half-civilized American cities, where [their] humanity is stunted and degenerated to the inhuman demands of a modern commercial and money-hungered helotism," Canadians could realize "their true natures and somewhat of God’s purpose in bringing them into…existence" (29)—that is, their "true natures" as British North Americans. In Campbell’s mind, the Great Lakes are "mystic guardians or dwellers at the gates of our community and personal existence" that can help "Canada to realize her ideals and responsibilities as a community" by inspiring Canadians "to be contemplative and to link their ideals with their daily lives" (26-27). It is ultimately as a "tonic" for the imperial spirit—the Schweppes and Canada Dry for the gin and rye of British and Canadian imperialism—that the Great Lakes have their greatest value:

The…four great lakes—Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior—form the wave-walls of two sides of the important triangular Province of Ontario, that garden of the middle north, which our first Governor, Simcoe, chose as the suitable seat of his ideal colony, which was, as he truly prophesied, destined to perpetuate British good government and British ideals on this side of the Atlantic. …They are, as the wise Governor foresaw, an effective barrier, shutting Ontario off from the communities to the south and west, so that the Canadian soil, the Canadian seasons, and the Canadian atmosphere, have been allowed to produce a peculiar stock of a British American people, which is already taking its place as a national factor among the ethical forces and race elements of the world. (30)

Beyond its environmental determinism, its Ontarian arrogance, and its racial nationalism, the passage contains sufficient insights into Canadian history and raises enough echoes in the works of George Grant, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, and numerous other thinkers and writers that it cannot easily be dismissed as the mere rantings of an imperialistic crank. In their vision of the Canadian heartland as an ideal realm whose natural innocence and communal values must be safeguarded from the incursions of American modernity, Campbell’s works are the not-so-very distant ancestors of Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965) and Technology and Empire (1969), Lee’s Civil Elegies (1968) and Savage Fields (1977), and Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) and Survival (1972), not to mention several other works of the 1960s and ’70s that engage in what Atwood calls "mythologizing or analyzing…the country’s predicament as a political victim" (Survival 242). However bizarre some of their ideas may now appear The Canadian Lake Region, Canada, The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither, The Canadian Guide-Book, and Roberts’s essay on "New Brunswick" in Picturesque Canada reflect modes of thinking and writing about this country that evidently had validity and force for their readers and, in variant forms and various quarters, have remained powerful and persuasive to some Canadians in the present century.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies 32.2 (Summer 1997): 79-99. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario for their generous support of my research and teaching, and to Michael Peterman and Thomas E. Tausky for valuable comments on the essay.

1. Karl Baedeker and his three sons began to publish guides to European countries and cities in the 1860s. The United States, with an Excursion to Mexico appeared in 1893 and The Dominion of Canada: with Newfoundland and an Excursion to Alaska in 1894. Both were written by James Fullarton Muirhead. [back]

2. For further discussion of the role of Longfellow’s Evangeline in generating tourism and patriotism in Nova Scotia, see the articles of N.E.S. Griffiths and Graeme Wynne. Other touristic works that capitalized on the Evangeline story around the turn of the century are Jeannette A. Grant’s Through Evangeline’s Country, a tourist guide published in Boston in 1894, and Amos Lawson Hardy’s collections of photographs under the title Evangeline Land (1902) and The Evangeline Land (c. 1902). Of Evangeline Land, Wynne remarks that several of its features, including "its well-worn title [and] its deliberate attempt to encompass the length of the Dominion Atlantic line," indicate that it, too, was "intended to appeal to the tastes of contemporary travellers" on the Yarmouth-Halifax line (73). The exploration of Evangeline by promoters of tourism falls squarely in the centre of what James H. Morrison calls the "‘elite sport tourist’ period" in Nova Scotia—that is, the period from July 1871, when a party of "some 400 Americans travelled by railroad to Nova Scotia from Boston" (where Evangeline was first published in 1847), to 1940, when the automobile initiated the "tourist explosion" of the "mobile period" (41-42). Morrison briefly discusses the roles of Roger Hallock (the first editor of Forest and Stream), Zane Grey, and Albert Bigelow Paine in promoting Nova Scotia as a destination for American sportsmen (42). [back]

3. A variety of reasons including copyright, his low regard for Sangster as a poet, and possibly, his knowledge, through Lighthall, that Sangster and his nephew were planning an illustrated guide to the region probably account for Roberts’s failure to quote from The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay in the central Canadian portions of The Canadian Guide-Book (see Roberts, Collected Letters 88, 104). [back]

4. In her History of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (1936), Marguerite Woodworth places The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither in the context of the amalgamation of the Windsor and Annapolis and the Yarmouth and Annapolis railways as the Dominion Atlantic Railway in 1893 and the subsequent decision of the new company both to exploit the Boston-Yarmouth service of the Yarmouth Steamship Company and to purchase its own boats in order to further increase the lucrative "tourist traffic": "[t]hroughout 1895 and 1896 the D.A.R. prepared the ground for the advent of their new boats. A New England Agency was installed...[in] Boston..., large sums were spent for newspaper publicity; supplies of literature, pamphlets, etc. ...were printed in England and sent over for distribution; Charles G.D. Roberts...was commissioned to write a railway guide that would appeal to prospective tourists; the Maritime Express Co. was formed (April 1895)...operating Halifax-Yarmouth-Boston-Saint John and connecting lines" (116). Woodworth also chronicles the "phenomenal increase" in tourist traffic between New England and Nova Scotia in the early ’nineties as a result of the co-operation between the province’s railway companies and the introduction of steel steamers on the Boston-Yarmouth route" (115-116). [back]

5. Apparently the steamer and engines were named after characters in Evangeline (see Roberts, The Land of Evangeline 3). [back]

6. It may also reflect an increased knowledge of therepeutic theory as a result of personal experience, for Robert’s letters of the early ’nineties suggest that for several years beginning in the summer of 1890 he himself suffered from bouts of weariness and depression due to domestic tension and hard work on such projects as The Canadian Guide-Book. In a letter of August 8, 1891, for example, he told William Morton Paine that "for the last twelve month" he has been "dull and oppressed (with a sort of nervous prostration…)" and thanks him for "being interested in [his] guide-book, written in the midst of great depression" (Collected Letters 134, and see also 133, 144-45, 153, 173, and 186). [back]

7. Woodworth describes the Yarmouth Steamship Company as "the pioneer tourist line in Nova Scotia’ and observes that prior to its formation in 1885 "travel between Yarmouth and Boston had been insignificant" (115). [back]

8. In the editorial Notes to Roberts’s Collected Poems mention is made of "[t]wo unidentified clippings" of "Blomidon," "one in the Rufus Hathaway Collection at the University of New Brunswick and one in the partial manuscript book of Songs of the Common Day at McGill University" (444), and of "an unidentified galley sheet" of "Whitewaters" with the byeline "‘King’s College, Windsor, N.S.’" in the Roberts Collection at the University of New Brunswick (462). Possibly the clippings are from copies of The Canadian Guide-Book and a galley sheet from The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither. [back]

9. Canada is so described on the half-title page of The Canadian Lake Region ([3]). [back]

10. Campbell had long-since alienated himself from his fellow Confederation poets by insulting them first covertly and then overtly (see At the Mermaid Inn and Hurst). In Canada he refers darkly to "a few writers who, without any true grip of Canadian life as it is, and seeking what they falsely think makes their work unique, strain to make out that the spirit of Canada is yet to be found in the wilds; but these are mere posers, who do not count in our real advancement—flies on the national wheel; such as are found in every country. Even these men produce their literary pablum in the heart of American or Canadian cities" (7). In castigating "narrow theoretical nationalists" later in the book he observes that "[w]e have in Canada, and have had in the past, a very few…writers and cliques" that have "exploite[d]…our new nationalism for the advantages which it may bring them" (50). [back]

11. The quotations that Arnold Haultain assembles in Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions (1913) to represent Smith’s "views as to the ultimate destiny of Canada" suggest that he remained an annexationist to his death in 1910 (see 107-09), but in Goldwin Smith: Victorian Liberal (1957) Elisabeth Wallace suggests that American "imperialist ambitions" in the Philippines and elsewhere around the turn of the century caused him "to doubt the wisdom of union with the United States" (278). [back]

12. See Campbell’s Selected Poetry and Essays (188-89) for his view in The Tragedy of Man (1912) that "the higher races of mankind are and were the result of a fusion, at some remote period, of a mysterious race of beings of loftier origins and condition, with a lower, autochthonous, or purely earthly race, who were possibly evolved from the lower creations" and "[t]hat this higher race had its origin from without the planet, or from some, now-lost condition of its relation to, or communication with the outside universe." [back]

Wynne, Graeme. "‘Images of the Acadian Valley’: the Photographs of Amos Lawson Hardy." Acadiensis 15.1 (Autumn, 1985): 59-83.