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 historic 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 Captain Phillip’s voyage to the other side of the world, when he led his little convict-laden fleet to Botany Bay—­a bay as unknown almost as any bay in Laputa—­that