[woop] LAURENCIANA 27 
is the reason why service must grow out of a national yearning for it, 
why statesmanship is more than a branch of business, why fleets and 
armies cannot be hired like journeymen, why pure science is of an 
altogether higher kind than any commercial application of it, and 
also the reason why you can no more separate use and beauty in any 
great art than you can separate soul and body in a living man. 
Unity involves idiosyncrasy: can we appreciate the higher faculties 
of other bodies when we do not appreciate those of our own? The 
thing is impossible. Take the five senses of Art—music, literature. 
architecture, sculpture and painting. They all grow out of the higher 
forms of life, yet are essential parts of it. Then, how can we appreciate, 
at all events as a people, their less intimate appeal, as the growth of 
other lives, when we have no native yearning for their more intimate 
appeal at home? 
We need business for our existence as much as any people. But 
we shall never do more than exist unless we have an exalting touch 
beyond. For the real life of any country depends entirely on its 
power of producing and appreciating units of genius devoted to the 
service of God and Man. 
But I forbear to meddle with these great matters any further, lest 
a still more pretentious preface should make a flatter anti-climax of 
a tentative introduction to a possible book. 
Any general view of the whole of the Laurentian waters may also 
itself be a too pretentious introduction for a book which is gradually 
growing out of various and variously published notes about the one 
special part of them where I happen to be a traveller at home—the 
Lower St. Lawrence from Montreal to the Sea. But this part is the 
greater because of that whole. 
These notes are purely personal, the mere record of impressions 
made by the life of the river on one who loves every single feature of 
it:—its sights and sounds; its many different craft, from birch-bark 
canoes to first-class battleships; its beasts and birds and fish; its 
Indians and hunters, fisherfolk and habitants, discoverers, explorers, 
sailors, soldiers, statesmen, saints, its men of science and its men of 
art—in a word, all that has made it, and all that we hope will continue 
to make it worthy of its old renown as “‘The Great River,” “The 
River of Canada.” But, personal as they are, I think these notes 
worth making now, when old and new are meeting along its course 
as they have not before and can not again. And I venture to hope 
that when the genius comes to make its life immortal he will re-make 
my ciphers with his own units into what will serve a more propitious 
future. 
