The Panama-Pacific Exposition opened on February 15, 1915, and closed on December 4 of the same year. It was participated in by the Argentine Republic, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Equador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Holland, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Mexico, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Panama, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Salvador, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

This enumeration of the countries participating will of itself suggest the somewhat new class of exhibits, as differing from those of older countries in former world-displays. The Panama-Pacific was thus its own precedent. Its claims to the novel and [page 232] the unique were extremely well sustained. It was the second exposition held on the Pacific cost, and it had the longest duration by four months of any ever held before.

The grounds comprised over 600 acres, with a water-front of two and a half miles, on San Francisco Bay, just east of the Golden Gate. On the other three sides they were partly enclosed by hills, thus forming a natural amphitheatre. There were eleven colossal palaces with many lesser buildings. These palaces were grouped in a series of rectangles connected by courts fascinated the eye by their colonnades, arches, domes, and glittering minarets. They were adorned by mural paintings of symbolic significance, by fountains, sunken gardens, and sculptured art, with niches and restful seats. Festival Hall, with its superb organ, where a concert was held every day, contained an auditorium seating three thousand people, and there were also ten smaller halls. The National Government staged its own special exhibit on a ten-acre space, appropriating two million dollars for this purpose, and this exhibit included a representation of the building of the Panama Canal.

In all this imposing world-panorama of twentieth-century exhibits, Canada led the procession. Whatever the enthralling nature of spectacles offered by other nations, it was the Dominion that set the pace. Canada, an entrancing, garlanded figure, [page 233] aglow with her abounding enthusiasms; her resistless energy; her dreams of a future that crystallise themselves in her all-conquering empire building—Canada the Spellbinder assumed her place as if by divine right, and certainly by common consent, as the very Winged Victory flying on into a golden future. The Canadian Building, whose classic beauty would have done no discredit to the Parthenon had it also occupied a place on the “Holy Hill” that overlooks all Attica; this structure, so simple yet so rich in architectural effect, her main portal guarded by great lions sculptured on either side, was one of the most impressive creations of the entire Exposition. With a singular comprehensiveness of grouping, the exhibits in this building represented the Dominion in her completeness. It was no one province that engaged the attention to the exclusion of another; it was the Dominion herself, in the unity of her vast empire, rather than any merely tributary feature of the country. In the inscrutable magic that wrought this effect lay the secret of its spellbinding quality. It was a power that enthralled every visitor who crossed the threshold, and brought him back to study it again.

How was this result achieved? The question was in the air. Every one asked it. No one could exactly answer it, but every one shared the wonder. The statistical data of the Dominion was impressive enough for almost any commensurate influence; yet mere facts and figures could give little clue to the [page 234] mysterious effect on the throngs of visitors. One might read that the population of Canada had increased from five million to seven millions in ten years; and that fifty-five per cent. of this population was engaged in conquering Nature, and transmuting her plains into golden harvests as a granary of the world; that her Government is expending ten millions a year in agricultural instruction alone; that her root and fodder crop each year is valued at almost two hundred millions of dollars, representing an area of nine million acres, and that the value of her field crops annually is five hundred and fifty millions of dollars. One might read that her live stock, valued at a given time at seven hundred millions, increased a hundred and fifty per cent. within one decade only. This visitor might recall the shrewd assertion of James J. Hill that “there is land enough in Canada, if thoroughly tilled, to feed every person in Europe”; and that, while at present only thirty-six million acres are under cultivation, there are four hundred and forty millions, thirty per cent. of her entire area, that are available for agricultural use. Yet not all these impressive statistics can alone account for the innate magic, the indescribable witchery, that Canada flings about all who come to look upon these marvellous panoramas in her building. Statistical data have their uses and inspire respect, while one cons them by heart and feels sure he is thereby equipped to give a reason for the faith that is in him; but in [page 235] his heart he knows that all the figures in the realm of mathematics could not really account for his consciousness of the fascinations of the Dominion. A leading journal of San Francisco, advocating the desire that the Californian exhibit should be made a permanent one, proceed to point the moral and adorn the tale by pointing to the Canadian exhibition. The editorial argument thus ran:

“Canada, with her complete exhibit, has won much praise from Exposition sightseers and has set the precedent for a permanent exhibit. One reason why our northern neighbour was able to make such a splendid impression at the Jewel City from the first was because, as its display was permanent, much of it had been installed in a European exhibition and had come directly here from across the Atlantic. The packing cases were ready to be opened and the best arrangement for the resources of Canada had been determined by experience.

“California needs to be an active participant in future expositions, as active as the Dominion of Canada.

.          .          .          .          .          .          .          .

“With a permanent exhibit California will be ready at the first sound of an exposition reveille to rush to the front, full panoplied in luscious armour of golden butter, armed with 42-cm. cases of preserved fruits and with glittering shields of virgin gold.

“Then bring on your Canada!”

The skill with which the Canadian exhibit was grouped impressed itself first as a work of art, and only secondarily as a thing of commercial value. This skill in presentation was not the least element in its attractiveness. Here was Dawson, shooting out rays of violent, vermilion, and orange, myriads of lights in all the colours of the spectrum. A panoramic [page 236] view of a wheat belt that would feed the world; Vancouver, with the great elevator at the water’s edge; and with that, was Vancouver’s prophetic dream of 1923, when three hundred millions of bushels of grain will be sent from Canada to Europe by the way of the Panama Canal; again there were the homes of farmers, attractive and realistic; an orchard scene introducing real fruit, and where realism ended and art began it was difficult to discover; the trees were laden with fruit; apples lay in heaps under the shade of trees; young men and maidens were gathering the rosy and the golden fruit, tripping over the green turf so naturally that one half wondered if they as well as the apples were not actual? Here was a section out of British Columbia showing a sportsman’s happy hunting-ground; there were snow-capped mountains, but with real water trickling down; an eagle, fierce, tempestuous, with widespread, flapping wings, is hovering in the air in a manner that would do credit to Heller, the wizard of necromancy on the stage. From yawning crevices bears emerge, until the visitor instinctively shrinks away, and the beaver is seen constructing his dam. Was it Governor Frontenac who recommended to the King of France that the beaver should be adopted as Canada’s trade mark?

There are mounted duck, grouse, elk, buffalo, and sullen, scowling caribou gazing at the surging throng. There are buffalo from the Peace River region, a thousand miles north of the [page 237] border between Canada and the states, where these hordes formerly ranged in countless droves, and which to-day is one of the finest of wheat-growing regions.

Nothing is more interesting to the curious visitor than are the views of typical Canadian homes. Some that are shown are but the growth of twelve years; from the time of the first turning of the plough in the prairie soil to completion of the two-storied, balconied house, with its broad piazza, set in the pretty grounds whose shady trees were planted as seedlings, with gay parterres of flowers in and around the curving walks and paths. The facilities for thus acquiring a home, by taking up the usual allotment of a hundred and sixty acres of land, which can be done on such favourable terms, turned the attention of many visitors toward the Dominion.

Another exhibit of great interest was that of power plant models, for every industrial centre in Canada has this abundance of power at very low rates, owing to the enormous supply of water power in the country. The canneries, too, form one of the most important industries, and their extent is well illustrated in the display made in the Canadian building.

There are cases upon cases of specimens of Canada’s precious minerals: gold from British Columbia, silver ore from Cobalt, gold from the Yukon, and copper and various other minerals, with representative specimens of coal deposits. Other glass cases [page 238] again display much of the flora of Canada, in a profusion of flowers whose rich and brilliant colouring attracts attention; and there are curious grasses and rare plants and foliage.

In one corridor are a group of life-like portraits in oil of King George and Queen Mary, of several of the Governors-General of the Dominion, and of many of the Government officials, Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Premier Borden. In this connection it is rather interesting to recall that the appellation of the term Dominion to the country was due to a member of Parliament who, after Sir John Macdonald had arranged for the confederation of the nine provinces, and a name was being discussed, said that he had that morning read in his Bible the words: “His Dominion shall be from sea to sea,” and the happy augury was seized and the term applied to the vast and splendid country.

Colonel William Hutchinson’s hospitable offices were a favourite rendezvous for appreciative visitors. Here gathered Canadians and Canada-lovers to discuss the latest news from the Dominion. So largely, however, had Colonel Hutchinson’s life been passed in the noted national and international expositions of the world that for fifteen years he has hardly been more than three months at a time in his home in Ottawa.

The Grand Trunk building offered, daily, a moving picture exhibition that attracted many onlookers, and so real were the effects that when in [page 239]one a torrent of water came rushing over a cataract, the visitor near involuntarily turned for a seat farther back. In this building, as in the national one, the Dominion was laid under tribute in representation that interpreted the essential life of Canada.

The superb collection of photographs of the scenic mountain route of the Grand Trunk Pacific was a perennial attraction to visitors in the exhibit made by this transcontinental railway. It revealed anew how the completion of the Grand Trunk System is an achievement which in its daring, its magnitude of interests, and the enterprise involved was one of the great twentieth-century events, and one only to be compared with the opening of the Panama-Pacific Canal itself.

The Reverend Arthur Barry O’Neill, C.S.G., after visiting the Exposition, wrote that he considered the Canadian and the Grand Trunk buildings as instances of “artistic genius beyond all praise,” and as a “lasting honour and credit to the Canadian Government.” In a sonnet in which Mr. O’Neill celebrates the youth of Canada, the brave lads who have gone to the front, and who

“…have writ a score
Of valour true, surpassing old romance,
And lent new pride to each Canadian’s glance.”

the poet adds:

“And here, as well, where contests fair of Peace,
The nations wage along the Golden Gate,
Huge throngs acclaim the Maple Leaf, nor cease
The chorused praise that makes our hearts elate.” [page 240]

[blank page] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: LOOKING TOWARDS MOUNT MUNN FROM THE VALLEY OF FLOWERS] 

   It is not the aim in this chapter to describe the whole of this interesting and beautiful Exposition, but only the contribution made by Canada; yet one can hardly refrain from nothing the charm of the Alaskan exhibit with its panoramic presentation of the Muir glacier; nor that of the Santa Fé Railway in the “Zone,” where the very realistic and wonderful portrayal of the Grand Canyon in Arizona was one of the great attractions of the entire grounds.

The Palace of Transportation was one of the extremely interesting features of the Exposition. Here could be studied the latest scientific methods of the day in many details not familiar to the general public, as, for instance, the method of handling mails on fast trains and the delivery at stations while the full speed of the train is maintained; many types of marine transportation; and still more of aircraft, the navigation of the air being one of the things constantly demonstrated to throngs of people who were absorbingly interested in the possibilities of aerial flight.

The experimental panorama of the Panama Canal itself was an appropriate feature. At the Exposition in Paris in 1900 the journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway was produced with extraordinary realism. The traveller entered a luxurious train, a very real train comprising drawing-room and dining cars, as well as a library car, and the passing of the long panorama of the entire scenery of that noted route gave a very vivid idea of what one [page 241] would see in the actual journey. The California Exposition arranged a similar exhibit of a journey through the Panama Canal. The voyager was invited to the deck of a steamer, and ingenious illusions illustrated the sailing from ocean to ocean.

San Francisco was a gala city through the entire summer. Not the least of the enjoyments were the sails in the splendid local boats, with glass-enclosed decks, across the Bay to Oakland and to Berkeley, the latter city the seat of the University of California. There were excursions for every day in the week for those who wished to vary the scene, and the Exposition itself constantly presented new attractions and new features with the great number of congresses, the numerous lectures, and perpetual fêtes.

The close of the Panama-Pacific Exposition was a scene worthy to live in historic pageantry. The day was one of June dropped into the heart of December. The sun was burning against a cloudless sapphire sky. Within the very radiance of the Tower of Jewels, on one of the terraces of the Court of the Universe, was erected a stand on which were assembled the Directors, the Commissioners of Foreign Governments, the representatives of the Army and Navy of California, and the representatives of the City of San Francisco. From the arches of the Rising and the Setting Sun the sculptured figures looked down. There was orchestral music, and the reading of Mr. Sterling’s poem from which lines have been quoted in preceding pages. The [page 242] message of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, was flashed around the world at the moment it was given to the Exposition. President Wilson well expressed the significance of the undertaking as one “eloquent of the new spirit which is to unite East and West and make all the world partners in the common enterprises of progress and humanity.”

The guards marched away; the sailors fired a salute; the Exposition banner descended. President Moore’s pictorial words have immortalised the scene:

“Night came on, and the world’s wonder of lights; the Exposition lights that would never shine again—a red glow on Kelham’s towers, rose flame in the porches of the Machinery Palace, dim reflections in the Lagoon of the Palace of Fine Arts and the broad basin in the Court of the Four Seasons, the splendour of the giant monstrances in the Court of Abundance, the silver phosphorescence of the Adventurous Bowman on his column and the Lord of the Isthmian Way on his rack-o’-bones horse, the tremulous frosty shimmer of the hundred thousand jewels of the great spire; and over all, the long bands, like lambent metal, of bronze and crimson and green and blue, from the forty-eight searchlights on the Yacht Harbour Mole, bands that barred the heavens so far that they deceived the eye and in the south-east appeared to converge beyond the hills of the city.

“Not abruptly, but slowly and gently, the lamps [page 243] grew dark, the beams of the searchlights faded, and arches and courts and colonnades and towers and sculptured forms of men and women and angels and great beasts receded into the friendly night, lighted now by the glimmer of the winter stars, Orion and Sirius, Aldebran and the Hyades. And through the starlight ‘Taps’ dropped in liquid notes from bugles high on the Tower of Jewels.” [page 244]

[unnumbered page, includes illustration: BULKLEY GATE (150 FEET HIGH), BULKLEY RIVER] [blank page]

CHAPTER XII

CANADIAN POETS AND POETRY

“My guide is but the stir to song.”

“But Love must kiss that mortal’s eyes
   Who hopes to see fair Arcady;
No gold can buy you entrance there,—
No wisdom won with weariness.”

“’Tis strange you cannot sing,’ quoth he,
‘The folk all sing in Arcady.’”

ARCADY, or Canada, are they one and the same? The pipes of Pan echo throughout the entire Dominion. The Poet—

“Born and nourished in miracles.”

writes his scroll by every shining lake, in the deep, dim interior of the forest, on every majestic mountain height. He renders constant service to the inward law, and it is the poet who is the real historian of his country. It is he who immortalises her heroic deeds; who paints her landscapes in unfading colours; who crystallises her greatness into song. One line of the poet’s may outweigh a volume of descriptive prose.

“His instant thought a Poet spoke
   And filled the age his fame.”

It would be a marvel if the Canadian colour and atmosphere did not produce a choir of singers, if not, [page 245] indeed, a nation of poets. Nor can national poetic feeling be measurably restricted to the comparatively few greater poets in any land or literature; to the supreme masters in the lyric art. The greatness of Wordsworth, Landor, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, of the Brownings, Tennyson, and of Swinburne, does not detract from, even though it overshadows, the charm of a score of the lesser poets, each of whom has his individual place. Had the lives of Browning and Tennyson been of the comparatively brief duration of Stephen Phillips, how much of their noblest work would have been unwritten? Had not Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, with angelic goodness, rescued Francis Thompson from destitution, what might not the world of poetic literature have missed? It is not alone by the standard of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Petrarca that the art of poetry should be estimated. To no inconsiderable degree the number as well as the quality of the poets of a nation are typical of the national inspiration.

The fact that Canada, as a country that looks back to hardly more than a century and a half of organised life and whose literary expression has been almost entirely within the past half century, should have produced a body of poetry that has just claims to being considered national literature is as impressive as it is interesting.

“Has Canada a voice of her own in literature distinct from that of England?” questions Thomas Guthrie Marquis. “In Poetry, at least,” he adds, [page 246] “the Canadian note is clear and distinct, and of permanent value.” There was little Canadian verse produced until well within the nineteenth century; and the first poem of real claim to distinction was the “Saul” of Charles Heavysege, published in 1857, a poem written “in the grand manner,” the author presenting his ideas “with a dignity, austerity, and epic grandeur that are found in few poetic compositions.” It was, however, with the decade of 1880-90 that the era of the modern and artistic poetic literature of Canada really opened, its keynote sounded by a poet, then hardly twenty years of age—Charles George Douglas Roberts—whose name has come to be widely known as that of one whose lips have been touched with the divine fire. His initial volume, Orion and Other Poems, revealed something in the quality that established his right to poetic rank. His very crudities, faults of construction inevitable to youthful ardour and inexperience, were still more suggestive of promise than higher technical excellence that might be recognised among contemporary verse. The classical tendency and temperamental assimilation were very obvious; the young man was evidently a devotee of Shelley and Tennyson; but he might easily have had worse masters. Six years later came his second volume of verse, In Divers Tones, that at once laid special claim on lovers of poetry; and when, in 1893, his Songs of the Common Day appeared, with its exquisite Ave, commemorating the centenary of Shelley, many people felt that [page 247] a new star had arisen to shine with permanent splendour in the poetic firmament. There are lines and stanzas in the Ave that are worthy to hold their immortality so long as the art of poetry lives to bless and ennoble and inspire life. Shelley—

             “the breathless child of change,
Urged ever by the soul’s divine unrest.”

And again:

“But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.”

And this stanza:

“Thyself the lark melodious in mid-heaven;
   Thyself the Protean shape of chainless cloud,
Pregnant with elemental fire, and driven
   Through deeps of quivering light, and darkness loud
With tempest, yet beneficent as prayer.”

And the breathing line:

“And speechless ecstasy of growing June,”

condensing in itself all the rapture of summer hours; or the beautiful stanza:

“O heart of fire, that fire might not consume!
   Forever glad the world because of thee;
Because of thee forever eyes illume
   A more enchanted earth, a lovelier sea!
O poignant voice of the desire of life,
   Piercing our lethargy, because thy call
Aroused our spirits to a nobler strife
   Where base and sordid fall,
Forever past the conflict and the pain
More clearly beams the goal we shall attain!”

Perhaps the most perfect lyric of Charles G. D. Roberts, and one that, while in no sense an imitation, [page 248] yet suggests the Break, Break, Break of Tennyson is that entitled Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea:

“Grey rocks, and greyer sea,
   And surf along the shore—
And in my heart a name
   My lips shall speak no more.

“The high and lonely hills
   Endure the darkening year—
And in my heart endure
   A memory and a tear.

“Across the tide a sail
   That tosses, and is gone—
And in my heart the kiss
   That longing dreams upon.

“Grey rocks, and greyer sea,
   And surf along the shore—
And in my heart the face
   That I shall see no more.”

   One of the stirring poems is that of An Ode for the Canadian Confederacy, in which occur the lines:

“Awake, my country, the hour of dreams is done!
   Doubt not, nor dread the greatness of thy fate.”

The lyre of Charles G. D. Roberts is one of many strings, and the temptation is rather irresistible to quote from him at still greater length.

Within the opening years of the decade of 1860-70 were born Charles G. D. Roberts, William Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, George Frederick Scott (now Canon Scott), and another who, though bearing the same name, is only related to the Reverend Canon by the ties of poetic brotherhood, Duncan Campbell Scott. William [page 249] Henry Drummond (known especially as “The Poet of the Habitant”) and Isabella Valancy Crawford belonged to the preceding decade, and although ranked as Canadian poets, were born in Ireland, coming to the Dominion at an early age.
William Wilfred Campbell is the poet both of Nature and of human interests. No adequate view of an art so many-veined and so fine as his can be presented within the limited space of these pages, but from his noble poem on England and this stanza is taken:

“And if ever the smoke of an alien gun
   Should threaten her iron repose,
Shoulder to shoulder against the world,
   Face to face with her foes,
Scot and Celt and Saxon are one
   Where the Glory of England goes.”

And this from The Hills and the Sea:

“Give me the uplands of purple,
   The sweep of the vast world’s rim,
Where the sun dips down, or the dawnings
   Over the earth’s edge swim,
With the days that are dead and the old earth-tales,
   Human and haunting, and grim.”

A discerning critic says of Mr. Campbell that his poems are “something akin to the whisper of silence, the magic of moonlight, the sadness of art.” Yet perhaps more than all one finds the tender human strain, as in The Last Prayer, of which these stanzas are representative: [page 250] 

“Master of life, the day is done;
   My sun of life is sinking low;
I watch the hours slip one by one
   And hark the night-wind and the snow.
     .          .          .          .          .         .
“And must thou banish all the hope,
   The large horizon’s eagle-swim,
The splendour of the far-off slope
   That ran about the world’s great rim,

“That rose with morning’s crimson rays
   And grew to noonday’s gloried dome,
Melting to even’s purple haze
   When all the hopes of earth went home?
     .          .          .          .          .          .
“Yea, thou mayst quench the latest spark
   Of life’s weird day’s expectancy,
Roll down the thunders of the dark
   And close the light of life for me.

“Melt all the splendid blue above
   And let these magic wonders die,
If thou wilt only leave me, Love,
   And Love’s heart-brother, Memory.”

His Canadian Folk Song has become a popular favourite. The last stanza runs:

“The firelight dances upon the wall,
Footsteps are heard in the outer hall,
And a kiss and a welcome that fill the room,
And the kettle sings in the glimmer and gloom—
Margery, Margery, make the tea,
Singeth the kettle merrily.”

It is in the setting of Canada’s wonderland to music that much of the best work of Mr. Campbell lies; in his Manitou, The Legend of Restless River, Dawn in the Island Camp, and the musical Vapour and Blue. He has made himself the interpreter of Nature in all her moods, as has also Archibald [page 251] Lampman, of whom William Dean Howells said that his pure spirit was electrical in every line; and that “the stir of wing, of leaf, of foot; the drifting odours of wood and field,” thrilled his readers in his verse.

In his Passing of Autumn Mr. Lampman gives this delicate picture:

“The wizard has woven his ancient scheme—
   A day and a star-lit night;
And the world is a shadowy-pencilled dream
   Of colour, and haze, and light.”

   And who would not turn to his April in the Hills to greet the springtime?

“I break the spirit’s cloudy bands,
A wanderer in enchanted lands,
I feel the sun upon my hands;
   And far from care and strife
The broad earth bids me forth. I rise
With lifted brow and upward eyes.
I bathe my spirit in blue skies,
   And taste the springs of life.

“I feel the tumult of new birth;
I waken with the wakening earth;
I match the bluebird in her mirth;
   And wild with wind and sun,
A treasurer of immortal days,
I roam the glorious world with praise,
The hillsides and the woodland ways,
   Till earth and I are one.”

Mr. Lampman was a master of the sonnet and one of these entitled Outlook touches a high notes, while another, The Railway Station, so interprets the poetic side of common experiences as to be rather distinctive among all his work and so claims reproduction here: [page 252] [blank page] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: CANOEING ON THE FRASER RIVER]

“The darkness brings no quiet here, the light
   No waking; ever on my blinded brain
   The flare of lights, the rush, the cry, and strain,
The engines’ scream, the hiss and thunder smite:
I see the hurrying crowds, the clasp, the flight,
   Faces that touch, eyes that are dim with pain:
   I see the hoarse wheels turn, and the great train
Move labouring out into the bourneless night.
So many souls within its deep recesses,
   So many bright, so many mournful eyes:
Mine eyes that watch grow fixed with dreams and guesses;
   What threads of life, what hidden histories,
What sweet or passionate dreams and dark distresses,
   What unknown thoughts, what various agonies!”

Bliss Carman has long been recognised by the critical lover of poetic art as a poet of unusual distinction and grace. When, in the days of his early youth, his poem Low Tide on Grand-Pré appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, all connoisseurs in poetlore felt the magical touch. Over all the barren reaches on which the sun had gone down the poet saw the “unelusive glories”:

“Was it a year or lives ago
   We took the grasses in our hands,
And caught the summer flying low
   Over the waving meadows lands,
   And held it there between our hands?
     .          .          .          .          .          .
“And that we took into our hands—
   Spirit of life, or subtler thing—
Breathed on us there, and loosed the bands
   Of death, and taught us, whispering,
   The secret of some wonder thing.”

That the poem is faintly, vaguely reminiscent of Swinburne’s Félise is only an added charm. Like a refrain of music lingers the last stanza: [page 253]

“The night has fallen, and the tide…
   Now and again comes drifting home,
Across these aching barrens wide,
   A sigh like driven wind or foam:
   In grief the flood is bursting home!”

Mr. Carman has kept faith with the poetic dreams of his youth. Could there be found in the songs of any land a lyric more subtle, more delicately exquisite in expression, than this which he calls The Unreturning?

“The old, eternal spring once more
   Comes back the sad, eternal way;
With tender, rosy light, before
   The going out of day.

“The great white moon across my door
   A shadow in the twilight stirs;
But now, forever, comes no more
   That wondrous look of Hers!”

Master of many and varied orders of song, Mr. Carman has the rare art of the ballad; and his blank verse, as his lyrical, is enticing. A series of the daintiest lyrics, Songs of the Sea Children, call up a very fairyland in which to wander. One of these (the lyrics form a sequence) thus portrays the mysteries of spring:

“In the blue mystery of the April woods,
               Thy spirit now
Makes musical the rainbow’s interludes,
               And pink the peach-tree bough.

“In the new birth of all things bright and fair,
               ’Tis only thou
Art very April, glory, light, and air,
               And joy and ardour now.” [page 254]

Bliss Carman is a word-painter as well as a poet in his lyrical work. With what fairy-like magic he pictures the landscape, the colouring, the very breath of the summer wind, the rustle of leaves, and the swaying of the flower on its stem.

From a multitude of examples, here is one poem, entitled The Dance of the Sunbeam:

“When morning is high o’er the hilltops,
   On river and stream and lake,
Whenever a young breeze whispers,
   The sun-clad dancers wake.

“One after one upspringing,
   They flash from their dim retreat,
Merry as running laughter
   Is the news of their twinkling feet.

“Over the floors of azure
   Whenever the wind flaws run,
Sparkling, leaping, and racing,
   Their antics scatter the sun.

“As long as water ripples
   And weather is clear and glad,
Day after day they are dancing,
   Never a moment sad.

“But when through the field of heaven,
   The wings of storm take flight,
At a touch of the flying shadows
   They falter and slip from sight.

“Until, at the grey day’s ending,
   As the squadrons of cloud retire,
They pass in the triumph of sunset
   With banners of crimson fire.”

Mr. Carman is pre-eminently the poet of nature, as how else could he be when, in The Breath of the Reed, he makes this appeal? [page 255] 

“Make me thy priest, O mother,
   And prophet of thy mood,
With all the forest wonder
   Enraptured and imbued;”

or when he thus expresses himself in The Great Return?

“When I have lifted up my heart to thee,
   Then hast thou ever hearkened and drawn near,
And bowed thy shining face close over me,
   Till I could hear thee as the hill-flowers hear.

“When I have cried to thee in lonely need,
   Being but a child of thine bereft and wrung,
Then all the rivers in the hills gave heed
   And the great hill winds in thy holy tongue—

“That ancient incommunicable speech
   The April stars and Autumn sunsets know—
Soothed me and calmed me with solace beyond reach
   Of human ken, mysterious and low.”

Mr. Carman is, however, more than writer of exquisite lyrics, more even than a painter and hymner of nature in its various aspects and moods. He is more deeply concerned with the mystery which we call life than with anything else, and again and again seeks to understand and express his sense of that mystery. His Behind the Arras—described by a recent writer as the most distinctive book of poems issued in English in the past quarter of a century—is a record of such attempts. We quote here the opening verse of The Players:

“We are the players of a play
   As old as earth,
Between the wings of night and day,
   With tears and mirth.” [page 256]

And here the first verse of In the Wings:

“The play is life; and this round earth
   The narrow stage whereon
We act before an audience
   Of actors dead and gone.”

And here are some lines from Beyond the Gamut which for philosophic insight are surely hard to equal in modern poetry:

“As all sight is but a finer hearing,
   And all colour but a finer sound,
Beauty, but the reach of lyric freedom,
   Caught and quivering past all music’s bound;

“Life, that faint sigh whispered from oblivion,
   Harks and wonders if we may not be
Five small wits to carry one great rhythmus,
   The vast theme of God’s new symphony.

“As fine sand spread on a disc of silver,
   At some chord which bids the notes combine,
Heeding the hidden and reverberant impulse,
   Shifts and dances into curve and line,

“The round earth, too, haply, like a dust-mote,
   Was set whirling her assigned sure way,
Round this little orb of her ecliptic
   To some harmony she must obey.”

The temptation to go on quoting from Mr. Carman’s work (which is more varied and touches more chords than most persons—even among those who endeavour to keep in touch with the poetry produced in our day—are aware) has to be resisted, but space must be found for a portion of a recent poem, A Mountain Gateway, in which, in beauty and clarity [page 257] of thought and expression, the poet reaches perhaps his highest point:

“I know a vale where I would go one day,
When June comes back and all the world once more
Is glad with summer. Deep with shade it lies,
A mighty cleft in the green bosoming hills,
A cool dim gateway to the mountains’ heart.

“On either side the wooded slopes come down,
Hemlock and beech and chestnut. Here and there
Through the deep forest laurel spreads and gleams,
Pink-white as Daphne in her loveliness—
That still perfection from the world withdrawn,
As if the wood gods had arrested there
Immortal beauty in her breathless flight.
     .          .          .          .          .          .
“And where the road runs in the valley’s foot,
Through the dark woods a mountain stream comes down,
Singing and dancing all its youth away
Among the boulders and the shallow runs,
Where sunbeams pierce and mossy tree trunks hang
Drenched all day long with murmuring sound and spray.

“There, light of heart and foot-free, I would go
Up to my home among the lasting hills,
     .          .           .          .          .          .
And in my cabin doorway sit me down,
Companioned in that leafy solitude
By the wood ghosts of twilight and of peace,
While evening passes to absolve the day
And leave the tranquil mountains to the stars.

“And in that sweet seclusion I should hear,
Among the cool-leafed beeches in the dusk,
The calm-voiced thrushes at their evening hymn,
So undistraught, so rapturous, so pure,
It well might be, in wisdom and in joy,
The seraphs singing at the birth of time
The unworn ritual of eternal things.”

In the Reverend George Frederic Scott, D.C.L., F.R.S.C., Canon of the Cathedral in Quebec since [page 258] 1894, Canada has a poet of high poetic seriousness of especial distinction, and with just claims to more than a national recognition. A long poem entitled Evolution, written by Canon Scott in 1887, stands as something unique in English-speaking poetry, in its presenting a great scientific truth with poetic expression. Of this some stanzas follow:

“Life out of death, death out of life,
   In endless cycles rolling on,
And fire-gleams flashing from the strife
   Of what will come and what has gone.
           .          .          .          .          .
“But what art thou and what am I?
   What place is ours in all this scheme?
What is it to be born and die?
   Are we but phases in a dream?
          .          .          .          .          .
“And we are present, future, past—
   Shall live again, have lived before,
Like billows on the beaches cast
   Of tides that flow for evermore.
          .         .          .          .          .
“That may be so; but to mine eyes
   A being of wondrous make thou art—
The point at which infinities
   Converge, touch, and forever part.
          .          .          .          .         .
“Thou canst not unmake what has been,
   Nor hold back that which is to come;
We dwell upon the waste between
   In the small ‘now’ which is our home.
          .          .          .          .         .
“But in the ages thou shalt be
   A link from unknown to unknown,
A bridge across a darkling sea,
   A light on the world’s pathway thrown.
          .          .          .          .         .
“And we must pass—we shall not die;
   Changed and transformed, but still the same,
To grander heights of mystery,
   To fairer realms than whence we came. [page 259] 

“God will not let His work be lost;
   Too wondrous is the mind of man,
Too many ages has it cost
   The huge fulfilment of His plan.

“But on we pass, for ever on,
   Through death to other deaths and life;
To brighter lights when these are gone,
   To broader thought, more glorious strife,

“To vistas opening out of these;
   To wonders shining from afar,
Above the surging of the seas,
   Above the course of moon and star;

“To higher powers of will and deed,
   All bounds, all limits left behind;
To truths undreamt in any creed;
   To deeper love, more God-like mind.
          .          .          .          .         .
“Great God! we move into the vast;
   All questions vast—the shadows come!
We hear no answer from the past;
   The years before us all are dumb.

“We trust Thy purpose and Thy will;
   We see afar the shining goal;
Forgive us, if there linger still
   Some human fear within the soul!
          .          .          .          .         .
“But lo! the dawn of fuller days;
   Horizon-glories fringe the sky!
Our feet would climb the shining ways
   To meet man’s widest destiny.

“Come, then, all sorrow’s recompense!
   The kindling sky is flaked with gold;
Above the shattered screen of sense,
   A voice like thunder cries, ‘Behold!’”

   In Canon Scott’s Requiescat, in memory of General Gordon, is one of the thrilling lyrics of memorial verse: [page 260] 

“O thou twice hero,—hero in thy life
   And in thy death!—we have no power to crown
Thy nobleness; we weep thine arm in strife;
   We weep, but glory in thy life laid down.
          .          .          .          .         .          .
“Saint! hero! through the clouds of doubt that loom
   O’er darkling skies, thy life hath power to bless;
We thank thee thou hast shown us in the gloom
   Once more Christ’s power and childlike manliness.”

   A quatrain on Darwin’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is worthy to be held in memory:

“The Muse, when asked what words alone
   Were worthy tribute to his fame,
Took up her pen, and on the stone
   Inscribed his name.”

   Full of tender and beautiful feeling is this little lyric of Canon Scott’s that he entitles Beyond:

“My heart it lies beyond, dear,
   In the land of the setting day,
Where the whispers are soft and fond, dear,
   Of the voices that pass away;
And oft, when the night is falling,
   And a calm is on the sea,
I fancy I hear them calling
   From that far-off land for me.

“It is only idle dreaming
   But the dream is full of rest.
And up where that glory is streaming
   From the gates of the golden west,
I wander away in spirit,
   With a mingled joy and pain,
Till I almost seem to inherit
   The sweet dead past again.
     .          .          .          .         .
“Yes, my heart it lies beyond, dear,
   Where that sun is burning low,
And were you not so fond, dear,
   I might perhaps—but no! [page 261]

Are you weary already with walking?
   And tears! What tears, dear, too!
How selfish of me to be talking,
   My darling, in this way to you!”

   One of the most widely known and frequently quoted of the poems of Canon Scott is the Van Elsen:

“God spake three times and saved Van Elsen’s soul:
He spake by illness first, and made him whole;
               Van Elsen heard Him not,
               Or soon forgot.

“God spake to him by wealth; the world outpoured
Its treasures at his feet, and called him lord;
               Van Elsen’s heart grew fat
               And proud thereat.

“God spake the third time when the great world smiled,
And in the sunshine slew his little child;
               Van Elsen like a tree
               Fell hopelessly.

“Then in the darkness came a Voice which said:
‘As thy heart bleedeth, so My heart hath bled;
               As I have need of thee
               Thou needest Me.’

“That night Van Elsen kissed the baby feet,
And kneeling by the narrow winding-sheet,
               Praised Him with fervent breath
               Who conquered death.”

Canon Scott, who may well be recognised as the most spiritual of Canadian poets, has published five volumes of poems, The Soul’s Quest, My Lattice and Other Poems, The Unnamed Lake, Poems Old and New, and In the Battle Silences, Poems Written at the Front. There is a depth of thought, an appealing [page 262] grace and tenderness of feeling in his work that insures his poems a treasured place in Canadian life.

Duncan Campbell Scott has the fascination of the spontaneous singer, and how all the entrancement of the Dominion is caught into these lines:

“Oh, Land of the dusky balsam,
   And the darling maple-tree,
Where the cedar buds and berries,
   And the pine grows strong and free!
My heart is weary and weary
   For my own country.”

   Something in this song recalls, like remembered music, Katherine Tynan’s (Mrs. Hinkson) haunting poem Homesick, of which two lines run:

“But my heart flies back to an Abbey gray
Where the dead sleep sweet, and the living pray.”

The professional critic could find many poems of Mr. Scott’s with intrinsically greater claim than this lovely little chanson, To B. W. B. (now Mrs. Duncan Campbell Scott), but something in the lilting cadence enchains the reader:

“The world is spinning for change
   And life has rapid wings;
Oh, one needs a steady heart
   Not to falter while he sings.

“But this is made for my Dear One
   When we are far apart,
That she may have, wherever she goes
   A song of mine in her heart.

“A song that will serve as an anchor,
   Compass, and pilot, and chart,
A song that will bid her remember
   That Love is the crown of Art.
     .          .          .          .         . [page 263]
“With a star from her open window
   When the cuckoo wakes with a start:
Oh, can she ever forget me
   With a song of mine in her heart?”

In The Voice and the Dusk what a play of colour:

“The slender moon and one pale star,
   A rose leaf and a silver bee
From some god’s garden blown afar,
   Go down the gold deep tranquilly.

“Within the south there rolls and grows
   A mighty town with tower and spire,
From a cloud bastion masked with rose
   The lightning flashes diamond fire.”

A poet’s nom de plume is that of “Katherine Hale,” so well known in private life as Mrs. John W. Garvin, who to her own charm as a poet must add still another as the wife of a poet and a critic of distinction as well. The gods endowed “Katherine Hale” with a resplendent lyre, and her poems have flown to many lands. Perhaps no poem of the war has more closely touched the universal heart than has “Katherine Hale’s” poem, so intense in its restrained power, entitled Grey Knitting, so widely known that from it only these three stanzas will be given:

“All through the country, in the autumn stillness,
   A web of grey spreads strangely, rim to rim;
And you may hear the sound of knitting needles,
   Incessant, gentle—dim.

“A tiny click of little wooden needles,
   Elfin amid the gianthood of war;
Whispers of women, tireless and patient,
   Who weave the web afar.
     .          .          .          .          .         . [page 264]
“I like to think that soldiers, gayly dying
   For the white Christ on fields with shame sown deep,
May hear the fairy click of women’s needles
   As they fall fast asleep.”

   What a spell of potent witchery she weaves in her song I used to Wear a Gown of Green:

“I used to wear a gown of green
   And sing a song to May,
When apple blossoms starred the stream
   And Spring came up the way.

“I used to run along with Love
   By lanes the world forgets,
To find in an enchanted wood
   The first frail violets.

“And ever ‘mid the fairy blooms
   And murmur of the stream,
We used to hear the pipes of Pan
   Call softly through our dream.

“But now, in outcry vast, that tune
   Fades like some little star
Lost in an anguished judgment day
   And scarlet flames of war.

“What can it mean that Spring returns
   And purple violets bloom,
Save that some gypsy flower may stray
   Beside his nameless tomb!

“To pagan Earth her gown of green
   Her elfin song to May—
With all my soul I must go on
   Into the scarlet day.”

The poets have been the celebrants of many of the historic epochs of Canada and the recorders of her great names; and in this especial line John Daniel Logan has rendered an interesting service in his Songs of the Makers of Canada. In these Dr. Logan has celebrated Cartier as the “dauntless [page 265] discoverer,” Champlain as the “first Canadian” Laval as “the high-priest of knowledge,” Wolfe as the “illustrious victor,” Brock the “valiant leader,” Crummond the “indomitable soldier,” Ryerson the “renowned educator,” Howe the “champion of self-government,” Macdonald the “great confederationist,” Laurier the “prophetic imperialist.” Such a collection, in its vigour and vividness of personal characterisation, is the very intellectual panorama of Canada. Of Macdonald, the “great confederationist,” the First Premier of the Dominion (1867), we find Dr. Logan saying:

“Macdonald, though thy soul hath passed away
From wonted wolds in our Canadian land,
Where thou wast chiefest of the fervid band
   That sought to give the people fullest sway
      O’er their own destiny, thy spirit goes
         Triumphant in this Canada of ours
         Resplendent now before the elder Pow’rs
      Who mark how virile our young nation grows!

“Thy wisdom was the vision of a seer
Who knew the meaning of the pregnant days
Which gen’rous Time should father into ways
   For unity….”

   In the memorial lyric to William Henry Drummond, whom Dr. Logan enshrines as “Sovereign of Joy and Prince of Tears,” the poet touches perhaps his most musical note in the lines:

“O Lost Canadian Singer of the winsome lays,
How farest thou along the Elysium ways,—
   Art thou companionless as we
            And sorrowing?
     .          .          .          .          .         . [page 266]
“O gentle heart, we wonder if thou farest happily
   With Homer and the Attic strain
   With Milton and the Tragic train.”

Among the younger Canadian poets are two sisters, Annie Campbell Huestis and Ethel Huestis Butler, who have each won distinction. One little lyric of Mrs. Butler’s, On Life’s Highway, is singularly poetic in its motive, contrasting the experiences of walking as companioned with Grief, or with Joy, and is expressed with much tenderness of feeling. The work of miss Huestis suggests that she makes her pilgrimages to the “holy hill,” and brings away with her all the fragrance of the thyme. A poem of hers entitled Aldaran, the Singer, has somewhat of that sustained sweetness and music that so signally characterised Mrs. Browning’s Catarina to Camoens. From Miss Huestis’s Aldaran are these extracts:

“Aldaran, who loved to sing,
               Here lieth dead.
All the glory of the spring,
All its birds and blossoming,
               Near his still bed
Cannot waken him again,
Cannot lure to hill and plain,
              Aldaran, the Singer,
                    Who is dead.

“Aldaran, who loved to sing,
               Here lieth low;
No again his heart shall spring
At the time of blossoming,
               Ah, who can know?
Still at dusk or break of day. [page 267]
Some can hear him on his way,
               Aldaran, the vanished one,
               Walking, hidden, in the sun;
Moving, mist-like, by the streams
When the early twilight dreams;
               Speeding on his quiet way,
               Never seen by night or day.

“But in pity drawing near
To the help of those who fear,
               To the beds of those who die,
               Singing low their lullaby,
Singing still, when they are far
Where the mist and silence are,
               Singing softly still that they
               May not fear the hidden way.
So, to those whose day is sped,
In the hour lone and dread,
               Cometh Aldaran, the Singer,
                  Who is dead!”

For her Magdalen, whose beauty of phrasing attracted attention when published in a leading critical review of New York, and in which there is a haunting reminiscence of Christina Rossetti, room must here be made, as it represents Miss Huestis in what is perhaps her most artistic mood:

“‘Where are you going, weary feet,
   Feet that have failed in storm and flood?
‘I go to find a flower sweet
   I left, fresh growing, near a wood.
The winds blow pure from many a hill,
   And hush to tender stillness there.
Shall not this restless heart be still,
   And grow more innocent and fair?’
‘Not so; for sin and bitter pain
Can never find Youth’s flower again!’

“‘Where are you going, wistful face,
   Face with the mark of shame and tears?’ [page 268] 
‘I go to find a quiet place
   Where no one sees and no one hears.
The beauty and the silence there
   Shall thrill me through and still my pain,
Shall touch my hardness into prayer,
   And give me back my dreams again.’
‘Not so; for Sin has closed the door
On Youth’s fair dreams forevermore.”

“‘Where are you going, heart of woe,
   Pitiful heart of fear and shame?’
‘A strange and lonely way I go,
   Where none shall pity, none shall blame.
Far with my sin and misery
   I creep on doubtful feet, alone;
No human heart can follow me
   To mark my tears or hear my moan.’
‘Nay; but the never-ceasing sting,
The clearness of remembering!’

“‘What do you see, O changing face,
   Alight with strange and tender gleams?’
‘I near the hushed and holy place
   Of One who gives me back my dreams.’
‘Where are you daring, eager feet,
   Feet that so wild a way have trod?’
‘O bitter world, no scorn I meet.
   Sinful and hurt, I go to God!
On my dark sin, forevermore,
A sinless Hand has closed the door.’”

Miss Huestis dons her singing-robes too infrequently; but who may venture on any prediction regarding the poetic production of one who is still on the threshold of achievement? For the poet, himself, least of all, may foresee his own future, nor is it given to those who love his songs to discern his future in the magic glass. The poet is ever a subject in a kingdom of untraced laws and unmapped territory. [page 269] 

“For voices pursue him by day
   And haunt him by night;
And he listens, and needs must obey
   When the Angel says, ‘Write!’”

Forever does he await the Voice and the Vision.

Louis Frechette is the French-Canadian Laureate, who was crowned by the French Academy, in 1881, for the striking merit of his tragedy, Papineau. Doctor Frechette (born in 1841) has contributed greatly to the fame of his country. In his La Decouverte du Mississippi, and in Le Drapeau Anglais, Saint-Malo, and others, is his real distinction felt. His poems are so long and so closely woven as hardly to lend themselves to extracts.

Thomas O’Hagan is one of the favourite poets of the Dominion, and aside from his own notable contribution to poetry, he has done and is doing a wonderful work in his scholarly and critical lectures on poets. His published lectures interpretative of Shakespeare, of Dante, and of Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, and others, are in constant demand. In A Gate of Flowers, An Idyll of the Farm, The Bugle Call, and the timely production I Take Off my Hat to Albert, are poems that inspire the popular favour; and in a lyric entitled Ripened Fruit these stanzas are especially calculated to awaken response:

“I know not what my heart hath lost;
   I cannot strike the chords of old:
The breath that charmed my morning life
   Hath chilled each leaf within the wold. [page 270] 

“The swallows twitter in the sky,
   But bare the nest within the eaves;
The fledglings of my care are gone,
   And left me but the rustling leaves.

“And yet, I know my life hath strength,
   And firmer hope and sweeter prayer,
For leaves that murmur on the ground
   Have now for me a double care.

“The glory of the summer sky
   May change to tints of autumn hue;
But faith that sheds its amber light
   Will lend our heaven a tender blue.

“O altar of eternal youth!
   O faith that beckons from afar,
Give to our lives a blossomed fruit—
   Give to our morns an evening star!”

Very distinctive is the work of Doctor William Henry Drummond, the poet of the “habitant” life. De Nice Leetle Canadienne and Leetle Bateese have become household songs. In the former one stanza runs:

“O she’s quick, an’ she’s smart, an’ got plaintee heart,
   If you know correc’ way go about;
An’ if you don’ know, she soon tole you so,
   Den tak’ de firs’ chance an’ get out;
But if she love you, I spik it for true,
   She will mak’ it more beautiful den,
An’ sun on de sky can’t shine lak’ de eye
   Of dat nice leetle Canadienne.”

   Leetle Bateese is a favourite with reciters who master the dialect, and who frequently delight their audiences by the mingled humour and tenderness of the picture: [page 271] 

“Too sleepy for sayin’ de prayer to-night?
Never min’, I s’pose it’ll be all right;
Say dem to-morrow—ah! dere he go!
Fas’ asleep in a minute or so—
An’ he’ll stay lak dat till de rooster crow,
               Leetle Bateese!
     .          .          .          .          .          .
“But, leetle Bateese! please don’ forget
We rader you’re stayin’ de small boy yet,
So chase de chicken an’ mak’ dem scare
An’ do w’at you lak wit’ your old gran’pere
For we’n you’re beeg feller he won’t be dere—
               Leetle Bateese!”

John W. Garvin, who has manifested his devotion to the muses by compiling a notable anthology of Canadian poets (recently published), is also a poet of recognition, and one of his productions, entitled Majesty, is especially original in conception. Mr. Garvin’s devotion to the poetic literature of his country has rendered great service in the way of making the poets known to the general reading public and bringing together, within convenient limits, much that is best in poetic art.

The names come to mind on Alfred Gordon, a young and gifted English poet now a resident of Montreal; of Ethelyn Wetherald, Robert Norwood, E. Pauline Johnson, the daughter of Chief Johnson of the Mohawks; of Virna Sheard, Alma Frances McCollum, Albert D. Watson, William McLennan, and William Douw Lighthall (whose recognition extends far beyond his native country); of Charles Mair, whose Tecumseh contains much that is excellent in poetic lore. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall has already [page 272] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: BREAKING CAMP] [blank page] established a claim to the wide recognition that opens before her, and her poem The Lamp of Poor Souls must be especially remembered. Jean Blewett is one of the most thoughtful and beautiful of the present choir of singers. Mrs. Blewett is Canadian born, and something of the high seriousness of life that characterises the Reverend Canon Scott seems reflected in the poems of Mrs. Blewett; as in the following, entitled Discontent:

“My soul spoke low to Discontent:
   Long hast thou lodged with me,
Now, ere the strength of me is spent,
   I would be quit of thee.

“Thy presence means revolt, unrest,
   Means labour, longing, pain;
Go, leave me, thou unwelcome guest,
   Nor trouble me again.

“Then something strong and sweet and fair
   Rose up and made reply:
Who gave you the desire to dare
   And do the right? ‘Twas I.

“The coward soul craves pleasant things,
   Soft joys and dear delights—
I scourged you till you spread your wings
   And soared to nobler heights.

“You know me but imperfectly—
   My surname is Divine;
God’s own right hand did prison me
   Within this soul of thine,

“Lest thou, forgetting work and strife,
   By human longings prest,
Shouldst miss the grandest things of life,
   Its battles and unrest.”

Helena Coleman has much of that spiritualisation [page 273] of vision which was so evident in Adelair Proctor, and which was exalted to the supremest poetic art by Mrs. Browning. From Miss Coleman’s Love’s Higher Way these stanzas are taken:

“Constrain me not! Dost thou not know
That if I turn from thee my face
‘Tis but to hide the overflow

“Of love? We need a little space
And solitude in which to kneel
And thank  our God for this high grace

“That He hath set His holy seal
Upon our lives. My heart doth burn
With consciousness of all I feel

“And own to thee, and if I turn
For one brief moment from thy gaze,
‘Tis but that I may better learn

“To bear the unaccustomed blaze
Of that white light that like a flame
Thy love has set amidst my days.”

Of Isabella Valancy Crawford, who flashed like a glancing star across Canadian skies, and whose death in 1887 (at the age of thirty-six) was a signal loss to her adopted country, Mr. Garvin, at once her biographer and the editor of the complete edition of her poems, well says: “A great poet dwelt among us and we scarce knew her.” William Douw Lighthall pronounces Isabella Valancy Crawford the most impressive Canadian poet next to Roberts. “This wonderful girl, living in the ‘Empire’ Province of Ontario, early saw the possibilities of the new field around her, and had she lived longer might have made a really matchless name. It was [page 274] only in 1884 that her modest volume came out. The sad story of unrecognised genius and death was re-enacted.”

This volume of Miss Crawford’s was handicapped by an infelicitous title. Old Spookses’ Pass; Malcolm’s Katie, and other Poems, was hardly a description to invite further investigation. The book passed almost unnoticed, and within three years its author died. “She was a high-spirited, passionate girl,” says Mr. Lighthall, “and there is little doubt that the neglect of her book was the cause of her death. Afterward her verse was seen to be phenomenal….It was packed with fine stuff.”

   Malcom’s Katie is the story of a man and a maid, the man going forth in the woodlands to hew a home with his axe, and the maid remaining in faith and devotion in her home. It is a long poem in blank verse, strewn with occasional lyrics, of which one runs:

“O Love builds on the azure sea,
   And Love builds on the golden sand,
And Love builds on the rose-winged cloud,
   And sometimes Love builds on the land!

“O if Love build on sparkling sea,
And if Love build on golden strand,
And if Love build on rosy cloud,
To Love these are the solid land!

“O Love will build his lily walls,
And Love his pearly roof will rear
On cloud, or land, or mist, or sea—
Love’s solid land is everywhere!”

Mr. Lighthall is himself a poet of distinction and [page 275] one of the best translators of French poetry. Among his finest work is a poem on Homer, breathing the very spirit of classic ages. Another is entitled Canada Not Last, a sonnet series to Venice, Florence, and Rome, the concluding sonnet, which follows, relating to Canada:

“Rome, Florence, Venice—noble, fair, and quaint,
   They reign in robes of magic round me here;
But fading blotted, dim, a picture faint,
   With spell more silent only pleads a tear.
Plead not! Thou hast my heart, O picture dim!
   I see the fields, I see the autumn hand
Of God upon the maples! Answer Him
   With weird, translucent glories, ye that stand
Like spirits in scarlet and in amethyst!
I see the sun break over you; the mist
On hills that lift from iron bases grand
Their heads superb!—the dream, it is my native land!”

Another genuine poet is Peter McArthur, one time editor of New York Truth and now farming at his old home in Ontario. Mr. McArthur has published but one volume of verse, but that volume is enough to place him securely well up among the truly authentic voices in the Canadian choir. Everything he writes has a markedly individual quality. There is nothing in him, as one writer has said, of the mere aesthetic or dilettante; he is alive to his finger tips. Mr. McArthur has a keen eye and ear for the common things of the life about him, as a witness A Thaw:

“The farmhouse fire is dull and black,
   The trailing smoke rolls white and low
Along the fields till by the wood
   It banks and floats unshaked, slow; [page 276]
The scattering sounds seem near and loud,
   The rising sun is clear and white,
And in the air a mystery stirs
   Of wintry hosts in coward flight.

“Anon the south wind breathes across
   The frozen earth its bonds to break,
Till at the call of life returned
   It softly stirs but half awake.
The cattle clamour in their stalls,
   The house-dog barks, he knows not why,
The cock crows by the stable door,
   The snow-birds, sombre-hued, go by.

“The busy housewife on the snow
   To bleach lays out her linen store,
And scolds because with careless feet
   The children track the spotless floor,
With nightfall comes the slow warm rain,
   The purl of waters fills the air,
And save where roll the gleaming drifts
   The fields lie sullen, black, and bare.”

But Mr. McArthur does not write simply of the life around him; the life within is of greater import to him. Here, as evidence of this, is a fine sonnet of his, entitled Summum Bonum. Mr. McArthur, it might be noted in passing, is a real master of the sonnet for all his few accomplishments in that form of verse:

“How blest is he that can but love and do,
   And has no skill of speech nor track of art
Wherewith to tell what faith approveth true
   And show for fame the treasures of his heart,
When wisely weak upon the path of duty
   Divine accord has made his footing sure
With humble deeds he builds his life to beauty,
   Strong to achieve and patient to endure.
But they that in the market-place we meet,
   Each with his trumpet and his noisy faction, [page 277] 
Are leaky vessels, pouring on the street
   The truth they know ere it hath known its action:
Or words or deeds shall merit the reward?

Agnes Maule Machar is another of the group of patriotic poets whose theme is often that of the Empire. She discerns the imperial conditions, and she is intensely in sympathy with the richness and beauty of the land. In Miss Machar’s A Prayer for Dominion Day these fine lines occur:

“O God of nations, who hast set her place
   Between the rising and the setting day,
   Her part in this world’s changeful course to play,
Soothe the conflicting passions that we trace
In her unrestful eyes—grant her the grace
   To know the one true, perfect love, that may
   Give noble impulse to her onward way—
God’s love, that doth all other love embrace!”

Lloyd Roberts, one of the young poets of the Dominion, the eldest living son of Charles G. D. Roberts, is true to his poetic birthright, and is the author of an impressive war poem, Come Quietly England, which opens as follows:

“Come quietly, England, all together, come!
   It is time!
We have waited, weighed, and blundered, wondered
Who had blundered;
      Stared askance at one another
      As our brother slew our brother,
And went about our business,
Saying, ‘It will be all right—some day.
   Let the soldiers do the killing—
   If they’re willing—
      Let the sailors do the manning,
      Let the cabinets do the planning, [page 278]

Let the bankers do the paying
And the clergy do the praying.
   The Empire is a fixture,
      Walled and welded by five oceans,
   And a little blood won’t move it,
      Nor a flood-tide of emotions.’
Well, now we know the truth
   And the facts of all this fighting;
How ‘tis not for England’s glory
   But for all a wide world’s righting.
     .          .          .          .          .
   “What Washington starved and strove for
In the long winter night;
      Lincoln wept for,—
Do we doubt if he were right?
   But for all a wide world’s righting.
     .          .          .          .          .
      “And who would fear to follow
   When Nelson sets the course?
         And who would turn his eyes away
   From Wellington’s white horse?
         Not one, I warrant, now—
      Not one at home to-day;
         In England? In Scotland?
      In the Green Isle cross the way?
No, nor far away to Westward
   Beyond the leagues of foam—
They are coming, they are coming,
   Their feet are turning home.
In Canada they’re singing,
   And love lies like a flame
About their throats this morning
   Their sea-winds cannot tame.
Africa? Australia?
   Aye a million throats proclaim
That their Motherland is Mother still
   In something more than name!

“It is time! Come, all together, come!
Not to the fife’s call, not to the drum;
      Right needs you; Truth claims you—
   That’s a call indeed
One must heed! [page 279] 
Nor for the weeping
   (God knows there is weeping!)
Not for the horrors
      That are blotting out the page;
Not for our comrades
   (How many now are sleeping!)
     Nor for the pity nor the rage,
But for the sake of simple goodness
   And His laws
We shall sacrifice our all
   For the Cause!”

One of the most brilliant of Canadian poets is Arthur Stringer, though he is more widely known as a novelist, his Silver Poppy and Wire Tappers having been the successes of their day. Mr. Stringer’s poetic work is striking for its variety and range. He has written lyrics and sonnets of almost Keats-like quality, and with as ready facility has written poems in the most modern form of vers libre. Then he has turned to the literature of ancient Greece and given us such things of pure beauty in blank verse as Hephæstus and Sappho in Leucadia, which do not shrink in comparison with any other modern work of their kind; and again has presented us with such pitilessly realistic and convincing pictures as The Woman in the Rain. He has also written verse of the Celtic order, his volume of Irish Poems being a well of true Irish humour and feeling. And yet, withal, Stringer is Canadian in every nerve and fibre of him. Listen to his Going Home:

“I tread each mountain waste austere,
   I pass dark pinelands, hill by hill;
Each tardy sunrise brings me near,
   Each lonely sunset nearer still. [page 280] 

“Sing low, my heart, of other lands
   And suns we may have loved, or known:
This silent North, it understands,
   And asks but little of its own!

“So where the homeland twilight broods
   Above the slopes of dusky pine,
Teach me your silence, solitudes;
   Your reticence, grey hills, be mine!

“Whether all loveliness it lies,
   Or but a lone waste scarred and torn,
How shall I know? For ‘neath these skies
   And in this valley I was born.”

   Here is a characteristic poem of Stringer’s entitled War, written years ago, and yet reading as if the ink in which it was written were still wet:

“From hill to hill he harried me;
   He stalked me day and night.
He neither knew nor hated me;
   Not his nor mine the fight.

“He killed the man who stood by me,
   For such they made his law,
Then foot by foot I fought to him,
   Who neither knew nor saw.

“I aimed my rifle at his heart;
   He leapt up in the air.
My screaming ball tore through his breast,
   And lay embedded there.

“Lay but embedded there, and yet
   Hissed home o’er hill and sea,
Straight to the aching heart of one
   Who’d wronged not mine nor me.”

   As a specimen of Stringer’s skill in handling of blank verse, here is a portion of the farewell between Sappho and Phaon in Sappho in Leucadia: [page 281]

   Sappho.                                                                                                                But you,—
You will forget me, Phaon; there the sting,
The sorrow of the grave is not its green
And the salt tear upon its violet;
But the long years that bring the grey neglect,
When the glad grasses smooth the little mound,—
When leaf by leaf the tree of sorrow wanes
And on the urn unseen the tarnish comes,
And tears are not so bitter as they were,
Time sings so low to our bereavèd ears,—
So softly breathes, that, bud by falling bud,
The garden of fond Grief all empty lies
And unregretted dip the languid oars
Of Charon thro’ the gloom, and then are gone.
   Phaon. Red-lipped and breathing woman, made for love,
How can this clamouring heart of mine forget?
   Sappho. You will forget, e’en though you would or no,
And the long years shall leave you free again;
And in some other Spring when other lips
Let fall my name, you will remember not.
   Phaon. Enough,—but let me kiss the heavy rose
Of your red mouth.
   Sappho.                 Not until Death has kissed
It white as these white garments, and has robed
This body for its groom.

   Another characteristic poem of Stringer’s, entitled, A Prayer in Defeat, will bear comparison with William Ernest Henley’s famous Unafraid:

“Still hurl me back, God, if Thou must!
   Thy wrath taught to know the dust
I have been taught to know the dust
   Of battle and despair.

“Bend not to me this hour, O God,
   Where I defeated stand;
I have been schooled to bear thy rod,
   And still wait, not unmanned!

“But should some white hour of success
   Sweep me where, vine-like, lead
The widening roads, the clamouring press—
   Then I thy lash shall need! [page 282]

“Then, in that hour of triumph keen,
   For then I ask thine aid;
God of the weak, on whom I lean,
   Keep me then unafraid!”

   Space cannot be found for it here, but following are a few verses from another beautiful poem, St. Ives’ Poor. The idea of this poem is found in the old saying that in the giving of alms the Christ is revealed:

“For O, my Lord, the house-dove knows her nest
   Above my window builded from the rain;
In the brown mere the heron finds her rest,
   But these shall seek in vain.

“And O, my Lord, the thrush may fold his wing,
   The curlew seek the long lift of the seas,
The wild swan sleep amid his journeying;
   There is no place for these.

“Thy dead are sheltered; housed and warmed they wait
   Under the golden fern, the falling foam;
But these Thy living wander desolate,
   And have not any home.”

   And here is an exquisite poem, The Immortal, which is full of Miss Pickthall’s own music:

“Beauty is still immortal in our eyes,
When sways no more the spirit-haunted reed,
When the wild grape shall build
No more her canopies,
When blows no more the moon-grey thistle seed,
When the last bell has lulled the white flocks home,
When the last even has stilled
The wandering wing and touched the dying foam,
When the last moon burns low, and, spark by spark,
The little worlds die out along the dark—

“Beauty that rosed the moth-wing, touched the land
With clover-horns and delicate faint flowers; [page 283]
Beauty that bade the showers
Beat on the violet’s face,
Shall hold the eternal heavens within their place,
And hear new stars come singing from God’s hand.”

   We cannot resist, before leaving Miss Pickthall, quoting a lovely little lyric of hers called simply Serenade:

“Dark is the Iris meadow,
   Dark is the ivory tower,
And lightly the young moth’s shadow
   Sleeps on the passion flower.

“Gone are our day’s red roses,
   Lovely and lost and few,
But the first star uncloses
   A silver bud in the blue.

“Night, and a flame in the embers
   When the seal of the years was set;
When the almond bough remembers
   How shall my heart forget?”

Passing mention has been made of the names of Ethelwyn Wetherald and Pauline Johnson, but the work of these poets is too distinctive to avoid some reference to it. Miss Wetherald has published some half-dozen books of verse, all made up chiefly of short lyrics, and all possessing an individual quality which may well be called unique. Here is one of her strongest poems, entitled Prodigal Yet:

“Muck of the sty, reek of the trough,
   Blackened my brow where all might see,
Yet while I was a great way off
   My Father ran with compassion for me.

“He put on my hand a ring of gold
   (There’s no escape from a ring, they say);
He put on my neck a chain to hold
   My passionate spirit from breaking away. [page 284]

“He put on my feet the shoes that miss
   No chance to tread in the narrow path;
He pressed on my lips the burning kiss
   That scorches deeper than fires of wrath.

“He filled my body with meat and wine,
   He flooded my heart with love’s white light!
Yet deep in the mire, with sensuous swine,
   I long—God help me!—to wallow to-night.

“Muck of the sty, reek of the trough,
   Blacken my soul where none may see,
Father, I yet am a long way off—
   Come quickly, Lord! Have compassion on me!”

It has been indicated that Pauline Johnson, whose death a few years ago is still fresh in the memory of those who knew her and her work, was Indian by birth and her poetry is marked by the vigour and virility which such a fact would imply. How Red Men Can Die and The Cry of an Indian Wife are perhaps her best-known poems, but they are too long to quote here. Following, however, is a little poem, The Honey Bee, which shows Miss Johnson’s keen feeling for colour, as well as her fine lyric quality:

“You are belted with gold, little brother of mine,
   Yellow gold, like the sun
That spills in the west, as a chalice of wine
   When feasting is done.

“You are gossamer-winged, little brother of mine,
   Tissue winged, like the mist
That broods where the marshes melt into a line
   Of vapour sun-kissed.

“You are laden with sweets, little brother of mine,
   Flower sweets, like the touch
Of hands we have longed for, of arms that entwine,
   Of lips that love much. [page 285]

“You are better than I, little brother of mine,
   Than I, human-souled,
For you bring from the blossoms and red summer shine,
   For others, your gold.”

The poet has no country save that of the kingdom of song, or rather, all countries are his own, and while Canada cannot claim Robert W. Service by birth, it is he who has so made himself the poet of her scenic grandeur and her primitive human experiences in the deepest emotions of life, love, death, sacrifice, revenge, that no sketch of Canadian poetry could omit the name of one who has made the Dominion known, in its grandeur and its mountain solitudes, the world over. Mr. Service has inevitably been much quoted in these pages; no one can travel in Canada, no one can write of Canada, without this perpetual consciousness of the vivid way in which he has translated her landscapes and her life. What a ring of the vitality that conquers the wilderness is in his Call of the Wild!

“Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,
   Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
   Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders
   (You’ll never hear it in the family pew),
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things?—
   Then listen to the wild—it’s calling you.

“They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,
   They have soaked you in convention through and through; [page 286]
They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching—
   But can’t you hear the wild?—it’s calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
   Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,
   And the wild is calling, calling…let us go.”

   In The Law of the Yukon we find:

“This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain;
‘Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane;
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat,—men who are grit to the core;
Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat;
But the others, the misfits, the failures,—I trample under my feet.

“I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;
Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.
Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first,
Visioning campfires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn.’
          .          .          .          .          .          .          .          .
“This is the law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive;
Dissolute, damned, and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,
This is the law of Will of the Yukon,—Lo, how she makes it plain!”

   Robert Service has many moods, and in the tender little lyric Unforgotten he dramatises the way in which one’s real life lies in his consciousness rather than enchained with the bodily presence:

“I know a garden where the lilies gleam,
   And one who lingers in the sunshine there;
   She is than white-stoled lily far more fair,
And oh, her eyes are heaven-lit with dream. [page 287]

“I know a garret, cold and dark and drear,
   And one who toils and toils with tireless pen,
   Until his brave, sad eyes grow weary—then
He seeks the stars, pale, silent as a seer.

“And ah, it’s strange, for desolate and dim
   Between these two there rolls an ocean wide;
   Yet he is the garden by her side
And she is in the garret there with him.”

   One of the wonderful poems of Mr. Service is that of My Madonna. The artist “haled” him “a woman from the street” for his model; he painted her:

“I painted her as she might have been
   If the Worst had been the Best,”

and she “laughed at the picture and went away,” but a connoisseur came and exclaimed:

“’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.”

“So I painted a halo round her hair,
   And I sold her, and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hilaire,
   Where you and all may see.”

No attempt to transcribe any impressions of Canada could attain to success that did not include some reference, even one so slight and imperfect as this, to her poets. Any adequate comment on her poetic literature would fill more than one volume of itself. They who make the songs of a people are traditionally held to be not less in influence than are they who make her laws; and that the future will be still more enriched with the enthusiasms and the strange and thrilling elements of the life of the Dominion is a foregone conclusion. [page 288] [blank page] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: MOUNT ROBSON, AT A DISTANCE OF TEN MILES]

CHAPTER XIII

THE CALL OF THE CANADIAN WEST

THE call of the Canadian West is far less the call of the adventurer, of the speculator, of the seeker of vast and sudden wealth than it is the call to carry an enlightened civilisation into the vast new region that beckons to humanity invested with all the alluring glory of the Promised Land. It is nearly three hundred years ago that the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New England to conquer the wilderness. But the Pilgrims did not find that the railways had gone before and prepared the way with luxurious trains of Pullman cars, or that telegraph and telephone service, in all varieties, to say nothing of Marconigrams, daily mails, motor cars, and various other amenities of life, were awaiting them. The New England of to-day is more indebted to the past half century for its advance than it is to the preceding two and a half centuries. So it may be fairly claimed that the Canadian West begins with the degree of progress, so far as mechanical conveniences and resources go, to which older countries have but just advanced. It is the heir of all the ages.

In normal times, before the War, there was an annual immigration into Canada that approximated [page 289] to the number of four hundred thousand people, of whom more than fifty thousand were from the United States. There was said to be in round numbers from fifty to seventy thousand who were neither from the States nor from the British Isles, while the remained were chiefly from England, Scotland, or Wales. The Irish immigration is more attracted to the States, as more than twelve millions of their race are already incorporated into the population of that country.

Two leading factors produce this large immigration into the Dominion. One is that Canada is a country whose richness of resources, climatic conditions, and scenic beauty are incomparable; the other is that there are wise and liberal provisions made by the government to offer desirable and attractive conditions and judicious inducements to the right sort of men to establish their homes in Canada. Thousands of prosperous farmers already scattered over Western Canada began, not many years ago, with inconsiderable capital, but their intelligence, industry, and integrity have carried the way and developed conditions of living that are eminently satisfactory.

The excellent character of the land in Western Canada is well displayed in the great region opened up by the Grand Trunk Pacific. Following for fifty miles the valley of the Assiniboine River, the line of railway goes through the drainage basin of Qu’Appelle River, and on into the great basin of the south [page 290] Saskatchewan River, crossing it at Saskatoon, the width of this basin being some 200 miles. Then on through the western part of Saskatchewan and the eastern part of Alberta, the railway makes a gradual ascent through sandhills and ridges until crossing the third steppe it proceeds for the remaining 130 miles, to Edmonton, over a level country. With the exception, and that an inconsiderable one, of these sandhills and ridges, there is no waste land between Winnipeg and Edmonton.

In the whole region now opened to civilisation by the Grand Trunk Pacific, there extends a belt of rich farming land from 300 to 500 miles in width from north to south and some 1000 miles in length from east to west. From Winnipeg to the west, the physical properties of the land are found by trained experts to be exceptionally advantageous for the growing of wheat, oats, barley, and flax; “in fact,” says Professor Clifford Willies (a recognised authority on soil physics), “the yields of small grain of this type were the best that I have seen anywhere in the best tilled fields of the United States.” Professor James H. Pettit, of Cornell University of Göttingen for work in soil fertility and bacteriology, finds that this recently opened up region possesses some of the richest soils, and that this is due to the alluvial deposits of the large area once covered by the old glacial Lake Agassiz. These deposits have left a soil of silt and clay that is capable of producing [page 291] thirty-five or forty bushels of wheat, and eighty or ninety bushels of oats to the acre.

To “mixed farming” as well as to the production of grain alone, or of live stock, all this enormous region lends itself. Before the country was opened and rendered accessible by the Grand Trunk Pacific, the region was practically a wilderness. The land was fertile, the numerous rivers and the lakes provided a sufficiency of water and generally promising conditions, but until transit was provided all these were unavailing. Prosperous towns have now sprung up all along the line of the railway, and the settlement of the country progresses with incredible swiftness. The settler arrives with his twentieth-century equipment. The contrast between the manner in which Canada is being gracefully and luxuriously settled, and that of the mid-nineteenth-century settlement of the western part of the United States, is something with which to reckon. The Canadian pioneer arrives in his Pullman car instead of the “prairie schooner” that slowly and wearily traversed the plains west of the Mississippi. He starts a steam engine to plough the land, and if trees or stumps come in his way he exterminates them with celerity by machinery. When the harvesting time comes, wonderful mechanisms cut the grain and bind it, while his trucks are perhaps equipped with motor power and swiftly carry the grain direct from the threshing-machines to the elevators, from which it is shipped to market. Wherefore, [page 292] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: MOUNT ROBSON GLACIER] [blank page] indeed, should he taste drudgery? Is he not the heir to all the ages?

The marked liberality of the Canadian Government in its universal provision for higher education is one of the features of the Dominion that can never be too deeply emphasized. Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton are all seats of universities, whose privileges are open to women on equal terms. At both Winnipeg and Saskatoon are also agricultural colleges, offering practical instruction in scientific farming, and the ways of wealth are at once made plain for the youth of the region.

The telephone service is practically universal, welding into unity all the labour on a great farm of hundreds of acres, and enabling the farmhouse to be in touch with city and town. Appreciating the importance of this, the government of each province lends substantial aid in the instalment of telephone service, and the main telephone lines in these three western provinces are owned and operated by the government. Thus all agricultural communities are linked together in close contact and communication.

Social conditions thereby establish themselves on a satisfactory basis. The comfort of the rural home is assured. There is no isolation to be encountered. Good roads, railway facilities of the best order that the world can afford, telephones, and telegraphs make possible a social life impossible under former pioneer conditions. [page 293]

Churches spring up wherever there are people, for religion and education go hand in hand in Canada.

The garden facilities are not the least of the attractions to settlers. The abundance with which garden stuff of all kinds—potatoes, peas, beans, onions, turnips, pumpkins, and squash, as well as lettuce, radishes, rhubarb, and small fruits—grow in all this region is something else to see.

This agricultural empire is so great in its promise for the future, so interesting and enchaining in its present development, that there is hardly a limit to the imagination regarding its importance in a not distant period.

The “great North-West” is a term which has been commonly employed to designate the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the northern part of British Columbia. It is rather a vague term; yet it indicates, if it does not exactly define, a region of unrivalled scenic grandeur, and of such potential resources and favourable conditions of climate as to virtually add a new continent to the world. Such is the march of progress, however, that at the time of writing the “North-West,” strictly speaking, is that portion of the land north of these provinces stretching eastward to Hudson Bay and northward to the Arctic Ocean and including that part of the Yukon on the Canadian side of the Alaskan border. This definition is according to Watson Griffin’s map of the Dominion of Canada in [page 294] his accurate and authoritative work, Canada of the Twentieth Century, which appeared in May, 1916, bringing all matter pertaining to the country up to date with statistical accuracy. It is pointed out by Mr. Griffin that in the older provinces, such as Quebec and Ontario, the climate has been virtually transformed by the culture of the soil. In southern Manitoba it is also on record that while the early settlers lost their crops by summer frosts, no such disasters are now experienced. The experiments in agriculture have proved that the soil under cultivation stores up the heat received during the long, bright days, and that the radiation of this heat at night prevents the fatal frosts. Climatic condition are not, therefore, arbitrary and fixed beyond control, but are largely amenable to civilisation. It is this fact that lends probability to the expectation of creating prosperous conditions for living in the region north of the sixtieth parallel. “In fact,” says Mr. Watson Griffin, “at some of the Hudson’s Bay Company posts in these territories the clearing, draining, and cultivation of the land has already had a remarkable effect, and if this is true where very small areas have been brought under cultivation, it is conceivable that the cultivation of wide areas might have a very great influence in preventing summer frosts.” If well-cultivated soil does receive and store the sun’s heat it seems reasonable to suppose that in these northern districts, where the summer days are so long, the general opening of [page 295] the soil to the sun and air should have a marked effect.

The most reliable experts unite in the conviction that the Mackenzie Basin is capable of supporting an agricultural population. The soil is rich; and in that part of the Basin alone, lying between Athabasca Lake and the Arctic Ocean, there is a belt of land 940 miles long and over 60 miles wide. Ninety miles south of latitude sixty-three ripe strawberries are found. A little farther to the south currants and other small fruits grow luxuriantly. There are already scanty settlements, remote and apart, in this country, and an increasing population of huntsmen, fur-traders, and tourists to whom sport is the attraction; and the first consideration that would occur to the traveller, or to any student of this almost unmapped region of infinite space, would be as to the ways and means for safeguarding human life and for the maintenance of law and order. For untold centuries this region has been the home and haunt of the Indians and of wild and ferocious animals. The Indian tribes possessed all this district in which to roam at will. Their means of subsistence were hunting and fishing, and their resources for clothing consisted in the skins and furs of captured animals. Any adequate conception of the wildness of this unbroken wilderness is almost impossible to grasp. The primæval forests impenetrable with their dense growth of underbrush, fallen trees, colossal rocks washed bare by the beating storms of [page 296] centuries, with uncounted and fairly innumerable leagues of lakes, rivers, swamps—how unconquerable this primitive world of Nature! Yet the call of the North-West, even this remote and unknown North-West, has sounded, and the ear of poet, prophet and priest is that which registers the cry unheard and unheeded by others.

It is a significant commentary on human life, in its assertion of that divinity which man feels within him, that the first white men to fare forth to penetrate this wilderness were the French missionary priests, and that the intense motive that drew them into hardships and dangers incredible was that of the love of God and the longing to make known to the untamed Red Man the help and comfort of the Divine Power—to bring to these children of nature something of the message of a diviner destiny. “To Pierre Radisson and his comrade, the Sieur Groseillers, belong the credit of having first penetrated this vast tract of undiscovered country,” writes Mr. A. L. Haydon in his remarkable book, The Riders of the Plains. No romance was ever more enthralling than this volume, nor would it be possible to offer any adequate interpretation of the great North-West that did not take account of Mr. Haydon’s work. With the thrilling adventures of these French missionaries all students of history are acquainted; and it is such a chapter in life and in literature that any transcription of the experiences would of itself make a volume. In its fulness it can only perhaps [page 297] be found in the pages of the Recording Angel. “They plunged into the unknown,” says Mr. Haydon; “took the daring leap that all such pioneers are called upon to take; and along the paths they blazed followed a host of others hardly less intrepid. He who would read of the further discovery and exploitation of the North-West of Canada must study the glowing life-stories of Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, De la Verendrye, and others.”

There were also temporal as well as spiritual leadings. The adventurous fur-traders pushed further and further into the primæval wilderness and established forts as centres of supplies and as definite places for their barter with the Indians. Two separate and important companies entered on this quest, the famous Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West Fur Company. The outposts that each of these energetic associations established were like lighted torches into the darkness; even this untrodden wilderness began to respond to the first conquest of humanity. Myths and traditions also led on. There were rumours in the air, whisperings of voices on the wind, that some vast and unknown sea lay between the western coast and Japan. The Pacific Ocean was known, but these nebulous intimations pointed to a body of water never yet discovered. “In 1731 the Sieur De la Verendrye, as gallant a gentlemen as ever sought his fortune in the new world, started gaily from Montreal upon the quest for this great sea. With his company he took the route up the [page 298] Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine, making camp at Fort Rouge, the site of the present city of Winnipeg. Rumours still haunted the air of “mighty waters beyond the mountains,” and over the infinite and trackless expanse of prairie they still further extended the march, but the formidable foothills of the Rocky Mountains proved too great a barrier, and it was due to the persistence, and probably, too, also to the greater physical vigour of a young fur-trader, Alexander Mackenzie, of the North-West Company, that the mysteries of the mountain ranges were penetrated, the foothills crossed, and the river traced that now bears his name.

These two fur-trading companies became important factors in the development of the North-West. There was an intense rivalry between them, yet the very intensity of the discord and ill feeling became an added impetus in the rivalry of exploration. Many and diverse qualities are brought into play in the conquering of a wilderness. Evil and good are always sown together like the wheat and the tares, and even the evil has its part to play and its work to do. Of this fierce rivalry between the two was born that activity which created so large a number of trading-posts, and the energy that founded numerous settlements, many of which are now recognised as prosperous centres.

In 1670, under the patronage of Prince Rupert, there was incorporated the “Honourable Company [page 299] of Merchant-Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay,” which developed later into the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Pierre Radisson and the Sieur Groseillers, both among the most daring and heroic explorers the world has known, excited a wave of enthusiasm in England by the reports of the wilderness they carried back with them. For more than a century the Company under the patronage of Prince Rupert continued to carry on a prosperous business, and after the two rival associations unite, a splendid business was developed. But while the rivalry had conduced to enterprise and exploration, the monopoly was as naturally concerned in not making too widely known the rich resources that might thus serve to attract other competitors.

Early in the nineteenth century a large Scotch settlement, under the auspices of the Earl of Selkirk, was established in the Red River region. They encountered almost every phase of hardship and trial. Great floods devastated their land and ruined their attempts at agriculture. The severe winters, with their enshrouding snow-drifts, their icy blasts, the imprisoning character of the elements, the remoteness from any vestige of human habitations or contact with civilisation, went far towards annihilating even the most persistent efforts to found a settlement that should withstand these conditions.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the [page 300] [blank page] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: FARMING IN SHELLBROOK DISTRICT, SASKATCHEWAN] settlements of the great North-West had become so numerous that there began to be requirements for larger means of protection. The Hudson’s Bay Company, at this time, held territory to the extent of over two million square miles. All this expanse was admitted into the confederation, to the re-assurance and great satisfaction of the settlers scattered over this wide region; but to the alarm and prevailing dissatisfaction of another order of the inhabitants, the French half-breeds, who were themselves a force with which a reckoning had to be made. Their alarm culminated in the Rebellion of 1869, an outbreak suppressed by Colonel (later Lord) Wolseley. Soon after this outbreak was quelled there came the formation of the Province of Manitoba, and from this event there dated a new epoch in the history of this part of the country. The conditions grew worse rather than better. The United States were also a contributing factor to greater discord. The treatment of the Indians by the government of the States had apparently left much to be desired (to put it mildly) and the turbulent warfare that went on almost continually in the western part of that country drove many of the Indian tribes into frenzy. Many of these tribes now crossed the border line into Canada to seek British protection. There were at this time in Canada some seventy thousand Indians to whom the Imperial government had promised protection, and the coming of these fresh tribes from the States, largely, too, [page 301] in conditions of revolt and resentment at what they felt to be unjust and cruel treatment, could not but be regarded with grave apprehensions by the white settlers. They were alarmed at the close proximity of these unknown savage tribes as well as apprehensive of the effect they might produce on the Canadian Indians.

In the summer of 1872 the Canadian Adjutant-General, Colonel Robertson-Ross, was dispatched by the Government of the Dominion to make a tour of inspection through the North-West. He found that a party of lawless traders and smugglers from the States had established a trading-post which they had named Fort Hamilton, about sixty miles north of the border-line between the Dominion and the United States; and that they were conducting a species of barter with the Blackfeet Indians, supplying them with firearms and with ardent spirits, in direct opposition to the laws of both countries. They were paying no customs duty for the merchandise they were thus introducing into Canada. Colonel Robertson-Ross found the demoralisation that they were working to be very great and of great injury, not only to the Indians, but to the entire country. “At Fort Edmonton,” said the Adjutant-General in his Report, “whisky was openly sold to the Blackfeet and other Indians trading at the Fort by smugglers from the United States, who derived large profits therefrom, and whom, on being remonstrated with by the official in charge of Hudson’s Bay [page 302] Post, coolly replied that they very well knew they were defying the laws, but as there was no force to prevent them they would do as they pleased.”

All this inciting to intemperance and brawling led to others offences against law and order. The Indians took to horse-stealing, and the entire population of the North-West was at their mercy. Neither property nor life was safe. On dishonesty and robbery followed murder as a not uncommon occurrence and other crimes of a serious nature were not infrequent. Sir John Macdonald was at this time the Premier of Canada. It was on his initiative that Colonel Robertson-Ross had been sent on this reconnaissance to find out to what extent the lawless marauders were demoralising the entire country and the nature of the protection and safeguards that should be instituted for the population. The Adjutant-General earnestly recommended the establishment of a trained and disciplined military body, to be subject to its own rules, and to be distinct from any civil force, though acting as an addition to whatever civil force might also be formed. “Whatever feeling may be entertained toward policemen, animosity is rarely, if ever, felt toward disciplined soldiers wearing her Majesty’s uniform in any portion of the British Empire,” stated Colonel Robertson-Ross, and he added: “In the event of serious disturbance a police force, acting alone and unsupported by a disciplined military body, would probably be overpowered in a [page 303] province of mixed races, where every man is armed, while to maintain a military without any civil force is not desirable.”

Colonel Robertson-Ross also urgently recommended that a chain of military posts should be established from Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains; that a stipendiary magistrate for the Saskatchewan should be appointed, who should also act as an Indian Commissioner and who should fix his residence in Edmonton. “The individual to fill this post,” he said, “should be one, if possible, already known to the Indians, and one in whom they have confidence.” He also pointed out that this Indian Commissioner should always be accompanied by a military force. “A large force is not necessary,” he said; “but the presence of a certain force will, I believe, be found indispensable for the security of the country, to prevent bloodshed and preserve peace.”

This is the story of the way in which the Royal North-West Mounted Police of Canada came into being. These “Riders of the Plains” stand alone and unparalleled in the world in their organisation, their peculiar field of work, and the nature of their control over the vast region entrusted to their care. This Mounted Police Force comprises about six hundred officers and men, whose territory is an area as extensive as all Central Europe, or a region five times as large as Great British; extending for two thousand miles east to west, and a thousand [page 304] miles from north to south. In this great area are twelve divisional posts and one hundred and fifty detachments. The organisation of this body was carried out in the autumn of 1873. The first one hundred and fifty of the Mounted Police were stationed at Lower Fort Garry in Manitoba. They were under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel George A. French, an officer of the Royal Artillery who had been the Inspector of Artillery at the School of Gunnery in Kingston, Ontario. Colonel French at once, on arriving in Manitoba, urged upon the Government the need of strengthening the force by at least doubling the number of men. Two hundred more were enlisted in Toronto, and the expedition to the Far West was fixed for an early date in the spring.

The picturesque aspect of the Royal North-West Mounted Police is notable. It was Sir John Macdonald’s idea that the dominant note in their uniform should be scarlet as “this colour conveys the strongest impression to the mind of the Indian, through his respect for ‘The Queen’s soldiers.’” To accentuate the military character of the force and to distinguish them from the blue-coated soldiers of the States was a point of real importance.

The first detachment of the Royal Mounted Police made an expedition in the summer of 1874 into the very heart of the Blackfeet country, and returned to Dufferin in November, having made an effective campaign in the interests of law and order, [page 305] from which very important and momentous results have ensued since that time. That the small body of less than seven hundred men should exercise such control, not only over so vast an area of almost unknown wilderness, inhabited by such a diversity of human beings scattered widely apart, is practically an isolated fact in all history. To this magnificent Force is largely due, to-day, the conditions that invest the North-West with such promise and prosperity.

“The Force may be said to have largely completed the work it originally set out to do,” writes Frank Yeigh[vi]; “so far as the frontier provinces are concerned, a work that is worth many times its cost, as an object-lesson of the power and authority of government existing behind all real civilisation.”

Still, the task of the mounted patroller is by no means yet completed. The present force costs the country nearly three-quarters of a million dollars a year. Their outposts are being set farther and farther afield. Thus, from the promontory of Cape Chidley, at almost the most northerly point of Labrador, the barracks overlook Hudson Straits; another guards Hudson Bay, while a third protects the Arctic seaboard, and the most western post serves to protect the gold land of the Yukon. It is a fact, and a striking one, that on the three-hundred-mile road from White Horse to Dawson the traveller [page 306] is as safe as in any part of Canada. Of the life of this Royal Force Mr. Haydon says:

“The stories of the daily life of these rough-riders of the plains are the very essence of romance, of high courage, of Herculean tasks performed and great difficulties overcome. The Mounted Police kept down lawlessness when the Canadian Pacific Railway was being built, they fought bravely during the Riel Rebellion of 1885, they kept well in hand the gold rush to the Klondyke in 1889-90, and not a few served in South Africa during the Boer War. But the deeds of the individual men call for high praise. Their qualities of fidelity, devotion to duty, and their fearlessness are constantly being exemplified. A thousand miles on the ice, ‘mushing’ by dog-team and komatik, through unexplored haunts of bear and wolf, is a common marching order for these splendid pioneers.”

One individual instance among the many that might well be related to add to the annals of human heroism is the remarkable journey made in 1906 by Constable Sellers, who, with an interpreter and an Eskimo, drawn by a dog-team, left the west coast of Hudson Bay in February of that year to discover the locality of a Scottish ship in the Arctic waters, to collect the customs due, and to inspect the conditions of this region. The trip lasted two months, and before his return in April Constable Sellers had experienced all the hardships of an Arctic winter. Many pages might be filled with the thrilling accounts of the adventures and the noble and self-effacing sacrifices of these brave defenders of the law, these magnificent protectors of human life and property, the very guardians of all that makes for civilisation and lends value and significance [page 307] to life. Mr. Yeigh’s description of the conditions of life of the force on Herschell Island is extremely graphic. He says:

“The life of the Mounted Policemen on Herschell Island presents many features of interest. Stranded in this far-off corner of the Dominion in the Canadian ‘Land of the Midnight Sun,’ he lives as near the North Pole as possible. It is a circumscribed island home, moreover, with a shoreline of only twenty-three miles, and with cliffs rising five hundred feet from the Arctic Sea. Though so far north, in latitude 69º, Herschell Island is covered with a luxuriant growth of grass and carpeted with innumerable wild flowers. The island possesses the one safe harbour in all these northern island possesses the one safe harbour in all these northern waters—a harbour in which fifty ships could safely winter.”

This island is distinguished as the centre of the whaling grounds of the Arctic regions.

No adequate interpretation of the conditions that prevail in the Dominion could be possible that did not include some account of the “Riders of the Plains.” The service of these faithful guardians is by no means exclusively limited to their official responsibility; they add to this that of being the friends, the helpers, of the settlers, under all the new unforeseen conditions that confront them in the new country. All over the Canadian land the watchword “Safety first” meets the eye. The watchword “Humanity first” seems to be that of the Royal Mounted Police. Their careful and tender ministrations are given to the invalid and the helpless; they risk their lives to warn and save settlers when a raging fire is sweeping over woodlands or prairie; they aid the new arrival to set up [page 308] his camp the first night; they help him to repair vehicles or mechanism that has given out; they assist him to build his first primitive shelter, and even to cook his meals and to care for his live stock. The safety of the incoming inhabitants, the essential conditions that render possible their establishment of a home, have depended so essentially on the protection and the safe-guarding afforded by the “Riders of the Plains” that their splendid service is not only a fundamental factor in Canadian life and history, but is a shining page in the records not made with hands.

A touching incident has been narrated in the chronicles of the Mounted Police Force. It was required some years ago to send dispatches to a distant post during the severest rigour of winter weather. A young constable, a University graduate, gently born and bred, set out with these dispatches, but days passed into weeks, and weeks into months, and no trace of him could be discovered. At last, in the following spring, a storm-worn uniform and the bones of a human body were discovered by a patrol in a secluded spot, and on the order he was carrying was scrawled: “Lost—horse dead. Am trying to push ahead. Have done my best.” Who could read with eyes undimmed by tears such a testimony as this to the young constable’s high sense of honour and utter sacrifice of anxiety for his own personal safety? No soldier at the front ever more gallantly faced death in the discharge of his duty. [page 309] Indeed, the stranger who comes to Canada and enters with any degree of sympathy and understanding into the national life is more impressed with the unwritten watchword of “Duty first” than with the legend of “safety” that meets his eye. Is it too much to say that the Dominion is the nation of heroes? It is certainly no exaggeration to say that heroes abound in this country where the unmeasured richness of the resources of Nature is yet far exceeded by the nobility of man’s mind.

The growth and expansion of Canada has proceeded very rapidly within the first part of the twentieth century. The problems involved in this swift expansion have increased in number and importance. They assume a varied character, because the vast extent of the empire inevitably raises such diverse questions of political, educational, and social requirements, that of the bi-lingual problem being not least in importance. Then there are the problems of immigration, of transportation and communication, including matters of railway highways, inland navigation, foreign commerce, and postal facilities. Sir James Grant, speaking before the Empire Club of Toronto in the December of 1915, reviewed the remarkable development of Canada since about 1850, and said that, marvellous as was this record, it would be exceeded by the tremendous developments of the immediate future. Of the new territory in northern Ontario, opened on the clay belt, Sir James predicted that it would be settled [page 310] by thousands of people, and that it would become one of the most attractive parts of the country. In this region the supply of wood and water is practically inexhaustible, and the splendid transit facilities bring it into easy communication with the markets. Apart from the agricultural, there is the mining outlook.

Even the great and disastrous war that began in August, 1914, will not be wholly disastrous, or even antagonistic, to the future of Canada. Great trade facilities will be opened between Russia and Canada. Vast numbers of British soldiers who have left their industrial occupations for the front will have so accustomed and acclimatised themselves to open air and exposure that they will look for life in the open rather than to any return to shops or manufactories. Canada confidently anticipates at least a million settlers from among these ranks. They would be particularly qualified for the order of life required for the hardy pioneer of that North-West defined by Mr. Watson Griffin as lying north of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, and stretching eastward to Hudson Bay and northward to the Arctic Ocean. They would be prepared to bring to this rigorous and exacting part of the country a hardy vigour and invincible courage in the conquering of nature in a degree quite in excess of that now demanded in the more settled regions. The young and eminently enterprising western Provinces have already made the establishment of [page 311] Winnipeg as one of the greatest wheat markets in the world an accomplished fact. “In 1904,” asserts a New York financial journal, “they raised fifty-eight million bushels of wheat in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta; five years later the yield was one hundred and fifty million bushels, and in 1913 the crop approximated to two hundred millions of bushels of wheat. At this rate of progress,” continued the journal, “Canada must soon pass France and India, and stand third in line of wheat producers. Ultimately she will dispute with Russia and the United States for the first position. Wheat has been the pioneer of our development, and undoubtedly it will prove the same with Canada…. No vivid imagination is needed to see what the future development of Canada means to the people of the United States.”

That the great problem of food for the people of Europe will largely devolve on Canada and the States for many years after the end of the war is quite evident.

The Minister of Public Works, the Honourable Robert Rogers, in an interview with a press representative, said no long ago:

“The prairie country will do its share in saving Canada when the war is over…. There will be a vast tide of immigration. Where will the European emigrants go? Will they go to foreign lands, lands where they will be lost forever to the Allies, or will they come to Canada, where they will be under the British flag? That is the vital question for Canada, for the Empire, for the Allies, for civilisation…. [page 312]

[unnumbered page, includes illustration: THRESHING WHEAT, MANITOBA] [blank page]

   “We want to be able to go practically to the door of every European who is thinking of a home elsewhere, and show him the Canadian West—tall wheat, ample railway connections, growing cities and all.

“It will be the finest thing in the world for him and the satisfaction of Canada. Moreover, it will be the solution of most of the problems which now confront him, as, for instance, how to make our transcontinental railways paying propositions; how to enable our industries to find new tasks when the war orders stop; how to adjust our mercantile system to the changed conditions; how to till our farm lands and start again the late lamented boom….

“The West is empty. Its natural resources are inexhaustible. We could take care of the entire British white population there. And think what it would mean for the West, and so for all Canada, if we got five million new people out there after the war? Winnipeg, Brandon, Regina; Prince Albert, Calgary, Edmonton; Medicine Hat, Portage la Prairie, Dauphin, Saskatoon, Lethbridge, Swift Current, and many other centres would become great cities. The salubrious British Columbia coast would seethe with new activity and new populations; our railways would become great earners; industries would spring up all over the West. The industries of the East would find a new market within their own tariff fence. Banking would boom, wholesale trade would flourish, young clerks in the East would become prosperous proprietors in the West.”

In the eager and many-sided activities that are springing up and fairly treading upon each other’s heels in Canada, Technical Schools hold a distinctive place. The late Lord Strathcona was a zealous and influential advocate of trade and technical schools as one of the most effective means of bettering the condition and elevating the life of the working-man. The great West is not behind in the establishment of these.

Now as to the conditions that await the settlers in [page 313] western Canada. The land is fertile; the climate, the water supply, and the transit and traffic facilities are of the best. But favourable conditions do not of themselves work miracles, and pioneer life has its difficulties. Prosperity is not magically invoked by any entreaty of the gods, nor does it fall down out of the blue sky upon its votaries. But with health, integrity, and a reasonable amount of capital, the achievement of prosperous and happy living is possible within a comparatively short time. It is related that after the annual harvest there are people who go on pleasure trips to New York and San Francisco, and “think nothing of expending thousands of dollars before their return.” There are farms where the owner has his motor car; his house, commodious and handsome, is steam-heated and electric-lighted, as he generates electricity from his own plant. There is a music room with a grand piano, and perchance a violin for the music-gifted young son or daughter as well; there is a library with a good and always growing collection of books, for it is realised that reading is not a mere passive entertainment but a creative activity as well. A good book sets the entire mental mechanism in motion. It is as a motor force, a power, applied to the mind. To give one’s self to intervals of reading is not merely to be borne through the realms of thought in a golden chariot, but is, rather, the conquering of a region of new capabilities and powers, applicable to the entire range of the problems [page 315] of life. “They key to every man is his thought,” says Emerson. Books are food for the mental and spiritual life, and from all good reading there results a certain transubstantiation into energy that refines and exalts the quality of life. The broad piazzas, the shaded lawns, of these prosperous farmhouses are a revelation to the traveller and their own commentary on Canadian conditions.

Not longer ago than 1900 agriculturalists contended that wheat could not be grown north of the fiftieth degree of latitude. The best quality of the grain is now raised in the regions north of the fifty-fifth degree. All the vast expanse of the Peace River country, for some 700 miles or more north of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, offers rich and attractive soil that well repays cultivation. As has been noted in preceding pages, regions that were formerly supposed to be adapted only to the most primitive conditions of life—to hunting, fishing, canoeing, or dog-sledging—are now found to be entirely amenable to ordinary life and pursuits, with a climate even less rigorous than is sometimes experienced in the winters of northern Dakota or Minnesota. The Japanese chinook wind that blows in tempers the air, and many of these northern lakes are now free from ice, for the most part, during the winter. This change of the climate has largely been brought about by the opening up of forests and dense undergrowth, which so intercepted the sun’s rays that ice would be found at midsummer in the dense shades. [page 315]

The valley of the Athabasca, stretching away from the portals of Jasper and of Jasper Park, is an Alpine wonderland; it is enshrined in legendary history; it is unrivalled in splendour of scenery and richness of colour; and traversed as it is by the most modern of our transcontinental lines, it becomes as easily accessible to tourists as are the romantic mountain haunts of Colorado. No more beautiful summer resort could be dreamed than that afforded by this valley. It is destined to become one of the famous mountain haunts of the world. Fine carriage roads are being constructed in Athabasca Valley that will add to the famous drive of the world, and rank with that never-to-be-forgotten drive from Sorrento to Amalfi, or that of the Corniche road on the Riviera. The Athabasca Valley and Jasper Park and Mount Robson Park will be developed into places of great international resort, as are the Yellowstone Park, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the Yosemite in the United States.

In the de luxe conditions of travel through all these regions to-day, it is as difficult to realise the conditions that prevailed there before the arrival of the railway line as it was for the little lad at school to transport himself into the pre-historic days before the telephone had established its universal sway. Reproved by his instructor for not knowing the date on which Columbus discovered America, he replied that he could not find it. “Not find it!” [page 316] [blank page] [unnumbered page, includes illustration: AFTER THE BEAR HUNT—MOOSE RIVER FORKS] replied the irate master, “there it is, right before your eyes, 1492!” The lad looked at it. “Why, I thought that was his telephone number,” he rejoined. It is quite as difficult for the traveller to-day to project himself backward, even into the environment of only a past century. The world into which we are born seems to have existed forever. It is a curious fact, but one that seems borne out by experience, that any event which just preceded one’s own consciousness and memory is practically as remote as if it were many centuries away. This truth regarding the phenomena of consciousness might well enlist the scrutiny of that analyst of Time and Memory, the brilliant Henri Bergson.

Is it amid all the transcendent beauty, all the scenic glory of the great North-West that one shall listen for the call and watch for the beckoning to the Promised Land? Its prairies and valleys provide every resource for the support of life, its forests offer the most incalculable yield in lumber, its lakes and rivers teem with fish, its mountains are rich in mineral wealth, it has water power to be utilised in manufactures, lighting, and traction to an extent that defies prediction; there is every contributing cause for great cities to arise, with universities, with their laboratories and observatories for science, while, with such a port as that of Prince Rupert, the commerce of the world will be brought to these shores; nor does it require any undue effort [page 317] of imagination to see, as in a vision, the libraries, the conservatories of music, the museums of art that will arise, the splendour of cities “with room in their streets for the soul.” The Call of the North-West is to art, to science, to poetry, to religion. It is the call to the great spiritual realities of the spiritualised life, “the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners.” The real task of man is that of the discerner of spiritual truth. “The universe is the externalisation of the soul.” And in this eternal quest man shall press forward “without haste, without rest,” consoled by his divination of spiritual ideals; a dweller in the atmosphere of spiritual splendour expressed in those immortal lines:

“I will wait heaven’s perfect hour

Through the innumerable years!” [page 318]

[2 blank pages] 

INDEX

AGRICULTURE, 293, 315
Alaska, the Great Country (Ella Higginson), 204
Allandale, 117
Alpine Club of Canada, 170
Archives (Ottawa), 80
Arlette, George, 231
Art Gallery, civic (Winnipeg), 152
Aurora Borealis, 216

Bacon, James, H., 192
Bancroft, George, 14
Banff, 127
Barrie, 117
Beaconsfield, Lord, 32
Bell Telephone Company, 227
Borden, Sir Robert L., 131, 188
Brett and Hall, Messrs., 190, 191, 192
Brown, George, 23, 28
Bulkley Gate, 176
Burpee, Lawrence, J., F.R.G.S., 169
Button, Admiral Sir Thomas, 9

Cabot, John and Sebastian, 3, 7, 9, 47
Campers, the true, 110
Camps: Minnesing, 113; Minne Wawa, 116; Nominigan, 112, 113
Carling, Sir John, 28
Carlyle, Thomas, 148
Cartier, Jacques, 3, 8
Chamberlain, Edison J., 181
Champlain, 3, 8, 56, 266
Château Laurier, 79
Clairoscope, the Heydon, 138
Climatic conditions, 295
Club, Canadian Women’s Press, 157
Cochrane, 144
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 113, 160
Connaught, Duke of, 81

Dawson, Sir William, 37
Degroseillers, Menart Chouart, 9
Deville, Dr. E., 168
Devonshire, Duke of, 81
Donald, Dr. W. J. A., 130
Doughty, Dr. Arthur, 80

Exposition, Canadian National, 96

Falls: Bala, 119; Emperor, 172; Karabeka, 122; Punch Bowl, 169; Thousand, 172
Farm, Central Experimental, 62, 80; branches, 62
Farming land, 291, 314, 315
Field, Miss Kate, 212, 220
Fiddle Creek, 169
Flavell-Astoria, 225
Foxe (1631), 9
Fraser, 3

Galt, Sir Alexander, 34
Georgian Bay, 121
Geographic Board, 167
Glaciers: Borden, 177; Muir, 212, 213, 241; Taku, 206
GoldenGate, 226, 232, 233, 240
Gravenhurst, 117
Gregory, John, 15
Griffin, Watson, 294, 295
Guyart, Marie, 49

Halifax, 63
Haydon, A. L., 297, 298, 307
Hays, Charles Melville, President, 4, 36, 179
Hazleton, 175 [page 319]
Herschell Island, 308
Heydon, Asa Thurston, 138
Higginson, Ella (Alaska, the Great Country), 204
Hill, James H., 235
Hopkins, J. Castell, 60
Hotels: Bigwin Inn, 105; Bulkley Gate, 177; Château Laurier, 153; Fort Garry, 141, 142, 153,
     154, 155; Highland Inn, 108, 110; Lake-of-Bays, 108; Macdonald, 153, 156; Minaki Lodge,
     123; Royal Muskoka, 118; Wawa, 101, 105, 106
Hudson’s Bay Company, 9, 19, 23, 125, 126, 154, 300, 301
Hudon, Henry, 9
Huntsville, 102, 108
Hutchinson, Colonel William, 239

Immigration, 290
Indians, relations with, 301, 302, 303
Inside passage, 201, 203
Institutes (Toronto), 97, 98

James, 9
Jasper House (Hudson’s Bay Company), 126
Jesuit missionairies, 13
Jobe, Miss Mary L. F.R.G.S., 174
Joliet, 8, 56
Juneau, 206, 208, 214

Kaien Island, 178, 190
Keliher, J. B., 181
Kempenfeldt Bay, 117
Ketchikan, 205
Kinney, Rev. George, 171

Lakes: Athabasca, 16; Avenue, 193; Beauvert, 166; Berg, 172; Brule, 126, 168, 170; Burns, 
     176; Cache, 114; Canadian, 188l Decker, 176; Edith, 166; Fairy, 108; Fish, 126; Great, 84,
     121; Great Slave, 16; Helena, 172; Jasper, 126; Kathlyn, 176; Lake-of-Bays, 100, 101, 102,
     103; Little Island, 114; Louise, 127; Maligne, 127, 165, 166; Mary, 108; Morse, 193; 
     Muskoka, 117, 118, 119; Nipissing, 120, 122; Ontario, 84; Patricia, 165; Peninsula, 108;
     Pyramid, 165; Rock, 114; Timagami, 137; Two Rivers, 116; Wainwright, 193; White, 114
Lampman (see Poets), 100, 119
La Place Royale, 73
La Rose Mine, 173
La Salle, 3, 8, 56
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 42, 80, 239, 266
Laval-Montmorency, François de, 38, 266
Laval University, 59
Library of Parliament (Ottawa), 82, 83
Library (Toronto), 89, 93
Locke, George H., 89, 90, 91
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 21
Lowell, Dr. Percival, 94, 95
Lumber industry, 199

Macdonald, Sir John, 3, 25, 32, 239, 303
Macdonald, Sir William, 56
MacDougall, Gov ernor, 24
Mackenzie, 3, 16
Mackenzie Basin, 296
Mance, Jeanne, 73
Marconi, 78
Marquette, 8, 56
McGill, James, 3, 36
McGill University, 76, 77
McLeod, Alexander, 15
McTavish, Simon, 15
Methodists, the, 42
Miette Hot Springs, 269
Mill, James, 5
Minaki, 123
Mines (chap. vi), 129
Minnecoganashene, 121
[page 320] 
Moore, President, 231, 243
Mortesen, A.M., 231
Mountains: Hudson Bay, 176; Juneau, 208; Laurentian, 119; Mount Edith Cavell, 167; Mount
     Hays, 191; Pyramid, 165; Robson, 168, 169, 172; Roche à Pendrix, 164; Roche Deboule, 177;
     Rocky, 163; Sir Robert Mount, 177; White, 107
Murphy, Mrs. Arthur (Janey Canuck), 157

New Brunswick, 60
New Liskeard, 134
Niagara, 6, 95, 96
Nibigami, 123
North-West Company, 15, 16, 19
North-West Passage, 15
North-Western Fur Company, 126
Norway Point, 102, 104
Nova Scotia, 47

Olier, Jean Jacque, 73
O’Neil, Rev. A. Barry, 240
Orilla, 117

Parks: Algonquin, 85, 100, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115; Jasper, 124, 125, 164, 166, 168, 169, 316;
     Mount Hays, 193; Mount Robson, 164, 169, 316
Passes: Peace River, 182; Pine River, 182; Wapiti, 182; Yellowhead, 158, 160, 163, 182
Perry, George H., 231
Phillips, Donald, 171
Pioneers, 3-8, 297-299
Poets, Canadian: Blewett, 273; Butler, Ethel Huestis, 267; Campbell, William W., 249, 250;
     Carman, Bliss, 249, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257; Coleman, Helena, 274; Crawford, Isabella V.,
     250, 274; Drummond, Dr. William Henry, 250; Frenchette, Louis, 270; Garvin, Mrs. John
     (Katherine Hale), 264; Garvin, John W., 272; Gordon, Alfred, 272; Heavyserge, Charles, 247;
     Huestis, Annie C., 267; Johnson, E. Pauline, 272, 284; Lampan, A., 100, 119, 249, 252; 
     Lighthall, William Douw, 272, 274, 275; Logan, J. D., 265; Mair, Charles, 272; McArthur,
     Peter, 276; McCollum, Alma Frances, 272; McLennan, William, 274; Machan, Agnes Maule,
     278; Norwood, Robert, 272; O’Hagan, Thomas, 270; Pickthall, Marjorie, 272, 283; Roberts,
     Charles G. D., 247, 248, 249; Roberts, Lloyd, 278; Scott, Canon, 249, 258; Scott, Duncan C.,
     83, 249, 263; Service, Robert, 172, 216, 286, 287, 288; Sheard, Virna, 272; Stringer, Arthur,
     280; Warman, Cy., 57; Watson, Albert D., 272; Wetherald, Ethelwyn, 272, 284
Porcupine Creek, 135
Porcupine Gold Camp, 136
Portland, 225
Prince George, 174
Prince Rupert, 174, 175
Puget Sound, 223
Pulpwood (industry), 145, 146

Queen Charlotte Sound, 204

Radisson, Pierre Esprit de, 9
Railways: Canadian Government, 123, 133, 137; Canadian Northern, 153; Canadian Pacific, 24;
     Grand Trunk, 35, 86, 120, 122, 126, 128, 137, 153, 239; Northern Ontario, 136, 137; Ontario,
     144; Temiskaning, 136; White Pass and Yukon, 214
[page 321]
“Ready-made Farming,” 146
Rebellion of 1869, 301
Redpath, Peter, 37
Rideau Canal, 65
Rideau Hall, 8
Riel, Louis, 24
Rivers: Assiniboine, 290, 299; Athabasca, 26, 163, 168; Bulkley, 175; Don, 89; Fairy, 108;
     Fraser, 174; French, 122; Grand Fork, 1723; Maligne, 126; Moon, 119; Peace, 16;
     Qu’appelle, 290; Red, 15, 18, 25, 155, 299, 300; Saksatchewan, 155, 291; Shadows, 119;
     Skeena, 175, 177, 196; St. Lawrence, 47; Telkwa, 176; Winnipeg, 143
Robertson, Colonel Ross, 92, 302
Rosedale Ravines, 89
Rose Point, 121
Royal Mounted Police, 304-309
Ryerson, Rev. D. Egerton, 42, 266

St. Anne de Beaupré, 50
Salvation Army, the, 185, 186, 187
Sans Souci, 121
Scidmore, Eliza Ruhamah, 210, 211, 212
Seattle, 195, 200, 201, 209, 225
Selkirk, Earl of, 17, 19
Sellers, Constable, 307
Seymour Narrows, 204
Sifton, Sir Clifford, 131
Silver Islet, 132
Simpson, Governor, 22
Skagway, 195, 200, 201, 214, 215
Social conditions, 293
Sowton, Mr. and Mrs., 186
Station, Doreen, 177
Steamship, Co., Grand Trunk Pacific, 195, 201-218
Steam navigation, 74
Sterling, George, 231
Strachan, Bishop, 41
Straits of Georgia, 204
Strathcona and Mount Royal, Lord (Donald Smith), 3, 20, 21, 25, 37, 41, 76

Taché, Archbishop, 40
Taku Inlet, 206
Talbot, Frederick A., 181, 182, 183
Telephone, first experiments, 219, 220
Tilley, Sir Samuel L., 32
Timagami, 116, 117, 123
Tupper, Sir Charles, 3, 31

Universities: California, 242; Manitoba, 142; Toronto, 88
Universities and schools, 39
Ursuline Convent, Quebec, 49
Valleys: Athabasca, 126, 316; Nechako, 175; Thousand Falls, 172
Vanderhoof Gateway, 175
Van Horne, Sir William Cornelius, 4, 35
Varennes, Pierre Gaultier de, 15
Victoria Jubilee Bridge, 67-70

Warman, Cy., 57
Walterson, Colonel H, 24
White, Horace, 24
Whitman, Walt, 1, 158
Wilson, Beckles, 21
Wilson, Woodrow, President U.S.A., 243
Wireless telegraphy, 78
Wise, Dr. 116
Women and their work, 75
Wrangell Narrows, 206

THE TEMPLE PRESS, LETCHWORTH, ENGLAND

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