the earth’s surface.  Whether the numbers of the Indians are an illustration of the same fact, or whether there is some special cause, is beyond my very modest scientific attainments.  When one reflects upon the countless herds of bison which used to cover the Western plains, or marks in the present day the race statistics of the French Canadians at one end of the continent, and of the Southern negro at the other, it seems absurd to suppose that there is any geographical reason against Nature being as prolific here as elsewhere.  However, these be deeper waters, and with your leave we will get back into my usual six-inch wading-depth once more.

X.

I don’t know how those two little books got in there.  They are Henley’s “Song of the Sword” and “Book of Verses.”  They ought to be over yonder in the rather limited Poetry Section.  Perhaps it is that I like his work so, whether it be prose or verse, and so have put them ready to my hand.  He was a remarkable man, a man who was very much greater than his work, great as some of his work was.  I have seldom known a personality more magnetic and stimulating.  You left his presence, as a battery leaves a generating station, charged up and full.  He made you feel what a lot of work there was to be done, and how glorious it was to be able to do it, and how needful to get started upon it that very hour.  With the frame and the vitality of a giant he was cruelly bereft of all outlet for his strength, and so distilled it off in hot words, in warm sympathy, in strong prejudices, in all manner of human and stimulating emotions.  Much of the time and energy which might have built an imperishable name for himself was spent in encouraging others; but it was not waste, for he left his broad thumb-mark upon all that passed beneath it.  A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our literature to-day.

Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best was the finest of our time.  Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive lines more noble and more strong than those which begin with the well-known quatrain—­

   “Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,
    I thank whatever Gods there be
      For my unconquerable soul.”

It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from a man who, through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned again, like an ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon’s knife.  When he said—­

   “In the fell clutch of Circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud,
    Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance
      My head is bloody but unbowed.”

It was not what Lady Byron called “the mimic woe” of the poet, but it was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake, whose proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.