Flint and Feather by E. Pauline Johnson
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page 3 of 142 (02%)
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added to the interest of the entertainment by rendering in a
perfectly marvellous way Dr. Drummond's Habitant poems. It was in the Steinway Hall, and the audience was enthusiastic. When, after the performance, my wife and I went into the room behind the stage to congratulate her, I was quite affected by the warm and affectionate greeting that I got from her. With moist eyes she told her friends that she owed her literary success mainly to me. And now what does the reader suppose that I had done to win all these signs of gratitude? I had simply alluded--briefly alluded--in the London "Athenaeum" some years before, to her genius and her work. Never surely was a reviewer so royally overpaid. Her allusion was to a certain article of mine on Canadian poetry which was written in 1889, and which she had read so assiduously that she might be said to know it by heart: she seemed to remember every word of it. Now that I shall never see her face again it is with real emotion that I recur to this article and to the occasion of it. Many years ago--nearly a quarter of a century--a beloved friend whom I still mourn, Norman Maccoll, editor of the "Athenaeum," sent me a book called "Songs of the Great Dominion," selected and edited by the poet, William Douw Lighthall. Maccoll knew the deep interest I have always taken in matters relating to Greater Britain, and especially in everything relating to Canada. Even at that time I ventured to prophesy that the great romance of the twentieth century would be the growth of the mighty world-power of Canada, just as the great romance of the nineteenth century had been the inauguration of the nascent power that sprang up among Britain's antipodes. He told me that a leading article for the journal upon |
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