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
