Prince Rupert and Alaska! They offer the traveller the very glory of the world and of all the heavenly spaces. {217} CHAPTER X PRINCE RUPERT TO VANCOUVER, VICTORIA, SEATTLE, AND THE GOLDEN GATE The voyage from Prince Rupert to Alaska is unparalleled in its glory of scenic enthralment; it is a trip unique and, indeed, quite unrivalled by any that this terrestrial sphere has disclosed to the wanderer over her spaces; yet hardly less interesting in a different way is that lovely sail of two days and two nights from Prince Rupert to Seattle, with calls at the ports of Vancouver and Victoria. The one enchants the imagination; the other relates itself to the great social order of human life. The latter reveals the vast resources of British Columbia; the almost infinite possibilities for the transcendent future of a new and still higher civilisation; the regions of the homes, the development, the nobler and still nobler culture of life in its evolutionary progress. The comfort and beauty of these Grand Trunk Pacific steamers are, as noted in the preceding chapter, responsible for much of the enjoyment of the voyage. To be comfortable--even to have the senses gratified with beauty in one's immediate environment--is by no means the chief end or aim {218} of life, but it is assuredly a means to an end; after that other things. He who is "Alive to gentle influence Of landscape and of sky, And tender to the spirit-touch," can hardly escape the immediate sense of a reinforcement of energy by the subtle charm of a pleasing environment. It is like the influence of music, harmonising and co-ordinating all one's powers of achievement. The coast of British Columbia, stretching away to the southland, has its own order of beauty, as has already been described in the description of the voyage which begins at Seattle extending to Skagway. The two days of return from Prince Rupert are only too brief for the traveller with an eye for the singular beauty of precipitous cliffs, forest-crowned, that rise, from the shores, brilliantly diversified with the waterfalls, islands, and glimpses of hanging glaciers, now and then seen under radiant skies.