The close of the Panama-Pacific Exposition was a scene worthy to live in historic pageantry. The day was one of June dropped into the heart of December. The sun was burning against a cloudless sapphire sky. Within the very radiance of the Tower of Jewels, on one of the terraces of the Court of the Universe, was erected a stand on which were assembled the Directors, the Commissioners of Foreign Governments, the representatives of the Army and Navy of California, and the representatives of the City of San Francisco. From the arches of the Rising and the Setting Sun the sculptured figures looked down. There was orchestral music, and the reading of Mr. Sterling's poem from which lines have been quoted in preceding pages. The {243} message of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, was flashed around the world at the moment it was given to the Exposition. President Wilson well expressed the significance of the undertaking as one "eloquent of the new spirit which is to unite East and West and make all the world partners in the common enterprises of progress and humanity." The guards marched away; the sailors fired a salute; the Exposition banner descended. President Moore's pictorial words have immortalised the scene: "Night came on, and the world's wonder of lights; the Exposition lights that would never shine again--a red glow on Kelham's towers, rose flame in the porches of the Machinery Palace, dim reflections in the Lagoon of the Palace of Fine Arts and the broad basin in the Court of the Four Seasons, the splendour of the giant monstrances in the Court of Abundance, the silver phosphorescence of the Adventurous Bowman on his column and the Lord of the Isthmian Way on his rack-o'-bones horse, the tremulous frosty shimmer of the hundred thousand jewels of the great spire; and over all, the long bands, like lambent metal, of bronze and crimson and green and blue, from the forty-eight searchlights on the Yacht Harbour Mole, bands that barred the heavens so far that they deceived the eye and in the south-east appeared to converge beyond the hills of the city. "Not abruptly, but slowly and gently, the lamps {244} grew dark, the beams of the searchlights faded, and arches and courts and colonnades and towers and sculptured forms of men and women and angels and great beasts receded into the friendly night, lighted now by the glimmer of the winter stars, Orion and Sirius, Aldebaran and the Hyades. And through the starlight 'Taps' dropped in liquid notes from bugles high on the Tower of Jewels." [Illustration: Bulkley Gate (150 feet high), Bulkley River] {245} CHAPTER XII CANADIAN POETS AND POETRY "My guide is but the stir to song." "But Love must kiss that mortal's eyes Who hopes to see fair Arcady; No gold can buy you entrance there,-- No wisdom won with weariness." "''Tis strange you cannot sing,' quoth he, 'The folk all sing in Arcady.'"