Let me repeat here, at the risk of seeming garrulous, a few sentences
in that article which especially appealed to Pauline Johnson, as she
told me:

"Part and parcel of the very life of man is the sentiment about
antiquity. Irrational it may be, if you will, but never will it be
stifled. Physical science strengthens rather than weakens it. Social
science, hate it as it may, cannot touch it. In the socialist,
William Morris, it is stronger than in the most conservative poet
that has ever lived. Those who express wonderment that in these days
there should be the old human playthings as bright and captivating
as ever--those who express wonderment at the survival of all the
delightful features of the European raree-show--have not realised
the power of the Spirit of Antiquity, and the power of the sentiment
about him--that sentiment which gives birth to the great human
dream about hereditary merit and demerit upon which society--royalist
or republican--is built. What is the use of telling us that even in
Grecian annals there is no kind of heroism recorded which you cannot
match in the histories of the United States and Canada? What is the
use of telling us that the travels of Ulysses and of Jason are as
nothing in point of real romance compared with Captain Phillip's
voyage to the other side of the world, when he led his little
convict-laden fleet to Botany Bay--a bay as unknown almost as any
bay in Laputa--that voyage which resulted in the founding of a
cluster of great nations any one of whose mammoth millionaires could
now buy up Ilium and the Golden Fleece combined if offered in the
auction mart? The Spirit of Antiquity knows not that captain. In
a thousand years' time, no doubt, these things may be as ripe for
poetic treatment as the voyage of the Argonauts; but on a planet