This beautiful landscape was to dominate and inspire his work for a lifetime. In 1874 his father, the Reverend George Goodridge Roberts, was appointed rector of Fredericton. The education provided at home by his father had been so excellent that Roberts completed Fredericton Collegiate in two years and received his B.A. from the University of New Brunswick in 1879. The primary influence on Roberts during these formative years, a time when post-Confederation national idealism was still running strong, was provided by a close-knit, conservative British society; by two classical scholars, his father and collegiate headmaster George Parkin; and by the beauty of the New Brunswick land, part pastoral, part wild. He was also proud of his maternal lineage and fond of boasting that the blood of his mother's Bliss family that had produced Ralph Waldo Emerson flowed in his veins. Roberts's
Canada Speaks of Britain (1941) includes the autobiographical "Two Rivers," in which the poet sees his own lifelong restlessness imaged in the Tantramar's tidal flow: "In discontent content alone, / you urge and drive me, Tantramar."
Roberts's first collection, Orion, and Other Poems (1880), was written while he was an under-graduate and published when he was twenty.
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