storic
associations, she is not so rich as are certain other European
countries, where almost every square yard of soil is so suggestive
of human associations that it might be made the subject of a
poem. To wander alone, through scenes that Homer knew, or through
the streets that were hallowed by the footsteps of Dante, is an
experience that sends a poetic thrill through the blood. For it is
on classic ground only that the Spirit of Antiquity walks. And it
went on to ask the question, "If even England, with all her riches
of historic and legendary associations, is not so rich in this
kind of poetic material as some parts of the European Continent,
what shall be said of the new English worlds--Canada, the United
States, the Australias, the South African Settlements, etc.?"
Histories they have, these new countries--in the development of
the human race, in the growth of the great man, Mankind--histories
as important, no doubt, as those of Greece, Italy, and Great
Britain. Inasmuch, however, as the sweet Spirit of Antiquity knows
them not, where is the poet with wings so strong that he can carry
them off into the "ampler ether," the "diviner air" where history
itself is poetry?

Let me repeat here, at the risk of seeming garrulous, a few sentences
in that article which especially appealed to Pauline Johnson, as she
told me:

"Part and parcel of the very life of man is the sentiment about
antiquity. Irrational it may be, if you will, but never will it be
stifled. Physical science strengthens rather than weakens it. Social
science, hate it as it may, cannot touch it. In the socialist,
William Morris, it is stronger than in the most conservative poet
that has ever lived. Those who express wonderment that in these days
there should be the old human playthings as bright and captivating
as ever--those who express wonderment at the survival of all the
delightful features of the European raree-show--have not realised
the power of the Spirit of Antiquity, and the power of the sentiment
about him--that sentiment which gives birth to the great human
dream about hereditary merit and demerit upon which society--royalist
or republican--is built. What is the use of telling us that even in
Grecian annals there is no kind of heroism recorded which you cannot
match in the histories of the United States and Canada? What is the
use of telling us that the travels of Ulysses and of Jason are as
nothing in point of real romance compared with