book was
important enough to be worth a leader. I turned over its pages and
soon satisfied myself as to that point. I found the book rich in
poetry--true poetry--by poets some of whom have since then come to
great and world-wide distinction, all of it breathing, more or less,
the atmosphere of Canada: that is to say Anglo-Saxon Canada. But
in the writings of one poet alone I came upon a new note--the note
of the Red Man's Canada. This was the poet that most interested
me--Pauline Johnson. I quoted her lovely canoe song "In the Shadows,"
which will be found in this volume. I at once sat down and wrote
a long article, which could have been ten times as long, upon a
subject so suggestive as that of Canadian poetry.

As it was this article of mine which drew this noble woman to me,
it has, since her death, assumed an importance in my eyes which it
intrinsically does not merit. I might almost say that it has become
sacred to me among my fugitive writings: this is why I cannot resist
the temptation of making a few extracts from it. It seems to bring
the dead poet very close to me. Moreover, it gives me an opportunity
of re-saying what I then said of the great place Canadian poetry is
destined to hold in the literature of the English-speaking race. I
had often before said in the "Athenaeum," and in the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica" and elsewhere, that all true poetry--perhaps all true
literature--must be a faithful reflex either of the life of man or
of the life of Nature.

Well, this article began by remarking that the subject of Colonial
verse, and the immense future before the English-speaking poets,
is allied to a question that is very great, the adequacy or
inadequacy of English poetry--British, American, and Colonial--to
the destiny of the race that produces it. The article enunciated
the thesis that if the English language should not in the near
future contain the finest body of poetry in the world, the time
is now upon us when it ought to do so; for no other literature has
had that variety of poetic material which is now at the command of
English-speaking poets. It pointed out that at the present moment
this material comprises much of the riches peculiar to the Old World
and all the riches peculiar to the New. It pointed out that in
reflecting the life of man the English muse enters into competition
with the muse of every other European nation, classic and modern;
and that, rich as England undoubtedly is in her own hi