of the French mind just as the "Marseillaise," the noblest and most impressive of popular poetic outbursts, illustrated national passion evoked by abnormal conditions. French Canadian poetry has been often purely imitative of French models, like Musset and Gauthier, both in style and sentiment, and consequently lacked strength and originality. It might be thought that in this new country poets would be inspired by original conceptions--that the intellectual fruition would be fresh and vigorous like some natural products that grow so luxuriantly on the virginal soil of the new Dominion, and not like those which grow on land which is renewed and enriched by artificial means after centuries of growth. Perhaps the literature of a colonial dependency, or a relatively new country, must necessarily in its first stages be imitative, and it is only now and then an original mind bursts the fetters of intellectual subordination. In the United States Emerson and Hawthorne probably best represent the original thought and imagination of that comparatively new country, just as Aldrich and Howells represent in the first case English culture in poetry, and in the other the sublimated essence of reportorial realism. The two former are original thinkers, the two others pure imitators. Walt Whitman's poems certainly show at times much power and originality of conception, but after all they are simply the creations of an eccentric genius and illustrate a phase of that Realism towards which fiction even in America has been tending of late, and which has been already degraded in France to a Naturalism which is positively offensive. He has not influenced to any perceptible extent the intellect of his generation or elevated the thoughts of his countrymen like the two great minds I have just named. Yet even Whitman's success, relatively small as it was in his own country, arose chiefly from the fact that he attempted to be an _American_ poet, representing the pristine vigour and natural freedom of a new land. It is when French Canadian poets become thoroughly Canadian by the very force of the inspiration of some Canadian subject they have chosen, that we can see them at their best. Fréchette has all the finish of the French poets, and while it cannot be said that he has yet originated great thoughts which are likely to live among even the people whom he has so often instructed and delighted, yet he has given us poems like that on the discovery of the Mississippi,[D] which proves that he is capable of even better things if he would always seek inspiration from the sources of the deeply interesting history of his own country, or enter into the inner mysteries and social relations of his own people, rather than dwell on the lighter shades and incidents of their lives. Perhaps in some respects Crémazie had greater capabilities for the poems of deep passion or vivid imagination than any of his successors in literature; the few national poems