Arcady, or Canada, are they one and the same? The pipes of Pan echo throughout the entire Dominion. The Poet-- "Born and nourished in miracles," writes his scroll by every shining lake, in the deep, dim interior of the forest, on every majestic mountain height. He renders constant service to the inward law, and it is the poet who is the real historian of his country. It is he who immortalises her heroic deeds; who paints her landscapes in unfading colours; who crystallises her greatness into song. One line of the poet's may outweigh a volume of descriptive prose. "His instant thought a Poet spoke And filled the age his fame." It would be a marvel if the Canadian colour and atmosphere did not produce a choir of singers, if not, {246} indeed, a nation of poets. Nor can national poetic feeling be measurably restricted to the comparatively few greater poets in any land or literature; to the supreme masters in the lyric art. The greatness of Wordsworth, Landor, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, of the Brownings, Tennyson, and of Swinburne, does not detract from, even though it overshadows, the charm of a score of the lesser poets, each of whom has his individual place. Had the lives of Browning and Tennyson been of the comparatively brief duration of Stephen Phillips, how much of their noblest work would have been unwritten? Had not Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, with angelic goodness, rescued Francis Thompson from destitution, what might not the world of poetic literature have missed? It is not alone by the standard of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Petrarca that the art of poetry should be estimated. To no inconsiderable degree the number as well as the quality of the poets of a nation are typical of the national inspiration. The fact that Canada, as a country that looks back to hardly more than a century and a half of organised life and whose literary expression has been almost entirely within the past half century, should have produced a body of poetry that has just claims to being considered national literature is as impressive as it is interesting.