"Isn't it shocking? I can't explain myself; and poor Mr. Arthur evidently can't make head or tail of me, and thinks me a little mad. So I am, in a sense. I am suffering from a new kind of _folie des grandeurs_. The world has suddenly grown so big; everything in the human story--all its simple fundamental things at least--is writ so large here. Hope and ambition--love and courage--the man wrestling with the earth--the woman who bears and brings up children--it is as though I had never felt, never seen them before. They rise out of the dust and mist of our modern life--great shapes warm from the breast of Nature--and I hold my breath. Behind them, for landscape, all the dumb age-long past of these plains and mountains; and in front, the future on the loom, and the young radiant nation, shuttle in hand, moving to and fro at her unfolding task!
"How unfair to Mr. Arthur that this queer intoxication of mine should have altered him so in my foolish eyes--as though one had scrubbed all the golden varnish from an old picture, and left it crude and charmless. It is not his fault--is mine. In Europe we loved the same things; his pleasure kindled mine. But here he enjoys nothing that I enjoy; he is longing for a tiresome day to end, when my heart is just singing for delight. For it is not only Canada in the large that holds me, but all its dear, human, dusty, incoherent detail--all its clatter of new towns and spreading farms--of pushing railways and young parliaments--of roadmaking and bridgemaking--of saw-mills and lumber camps--detail so different from anything I have ever discussed with Arthur Delaine before. Some of it is ugly, I know--I don't care! It is like a Rembrandt ugliness--that only helps and ministers to a stronger beauty, the beauty of prairie and sky, and the beauty of the human battle, the battle of blood and brain, with the earth and her forces.
"'_Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare!_'"
"There is a man here--a Mr. George Anderson, of whom I told you something in my last letter--who seems to embody the very life of this country, to be the prairie, and the railway, and the forest--their very spirit and avatar. Personally, he is often sad; his own life has been hard; and yet the heart of him is all hope and courage, all delight too in the daily planning and wrestling, the contrivance and the cleverness, the rifling and outwitting of Nature--that makes a Canadian--at any rate a Western Canadian. I suppose he doesn't know anything about art. Mr. Arthur seems to have nothing in common with him; but there is in him that rush and energy of life, from which, surely, art and poetry spring, when the time is ripe.