O child of nations, giant-limbed, Who stand'st among the nations now Unheeded, unadored, unhymned, With unanointed brow!
Speaking of Roberts in _The Writer_ once, his friend Hovey said: "All his excursions include a return ticket to the Maritime Provinces, and 'Up and Away in the Morning' is always for the sake of 'Home, Home in the Evening.'" This statement has been contradicted by Roberts's life during the last few years. He is to be found in New York winter and summer.
At the same time we should be stultifying ourselves to deny his loyalty to his native land. It lives in many of his pages; it is kept aflame by ties of family and of friendship. The beautiful part of the world northeast of New England has been to him nursery, academy and studio. Indeed, one who knew him well has said: "He is neither Briton nor American, but assertively Canadian; and, if history ever make his dream a reality, his own poems will not have been an entirely negligible factor in bringing it to pass."
Charles George Douglass Roberts, M.A., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.L., was born in Douglas, at the mouth of the Keswick River, near Fredericton, New Brunswick, on January 10, 1860. His father, the Rev. G. Goodridge Roberts, M.A., the son of Professor George Roberts, Ph.D., is the rector of the English church in Fredericton, and also the canon of Christ Church Cathedral. His mother, Emma Wetmore Bliss Roberts, comes of what used to be known as United Empire Loyalist stock--the same stock, by the way, that Emerson's mother came of. Her ancestors left the colonies for the provinces at the outbreak of the American Revolution. There were many influential families among the Loyalists, and, on the whole, their headstrong flight has been beneficial to the land 'way down East. The novelist's mother, it should be said, is a sister of Bliss Carman's mother, which makes the two young writers, Roberts and Carman, cousins by blood as well as brothers by profession. A strong intellectual ancestry has Roberts, it will be seen, an ancestry that fully accounts for the circumstance that his sister and his two younger brothers are skillful at versification.
The first fourteen years of Roberts's life were spent in Woodstock, of which parish his father was then the rector, and up to the end of these fourteen years Charles's education had been personally supervised by his father. Fortunate conditions!--as they who have missed such supervision can most eloquently testify. Ideal conditions, if we are to accept the well-digested opinion of scholastic as well as of medical experts.