[woop] LAURENCIANA 29 
—salt and fresh, tidal and lake—are not only immeasurably first 
among their rivals, taken singly, but unchallengeably first compared 
with all their rivals united together, throughout the whole world 
beside. 
Mere size, however, is a vacuous thing to conjure with—except 
before press-ridden audiences, whose minds have been perverted to 
machine-made ends. And even the St. Lawrence would be nothing 
to glory in if it could only boast a statistical supremacy of so many 
gallons of water. But its lasting appeal is to a higher sense than this, 
to the sense of supreme delight in the consummate union of strength 
and beauty, in beauty that is often stern and wild, and strength that 
is sometimes passive; but always to both together. 
II. Look at those most eastern gateways of the whole New 
World—the Straits of Cabot and Belle Isle. The narrow passage of 
Belle Isle may flow between a grim stretch of Labrador and a wild 
point of Newfoundland; but it is a worthy portal, and its Island a 
worthy sentinel, with seven hundred feet of dauntless granite fronting 
the forces of the North Atlantic. The much wider Cabot Strait is 
sixty miles across; but both its bold shores are in view of each other. 
Cape North is four hundred, Cape Ray a thousand feet higher than 
Belle Isle. There can be no mistake about the exact points at which 
you enter Laurentian waters, when you have such landmarks as these 
to bring abeam. Nor is there any weak touch of indistinction about 
the Long Range of Newfoundland, which runs north and south between 
these straits for over three hundred miles, often at a height of two 
thousand feet. This Long Range forms the base of the whole island 
stronghold, which throws its farthest salient the same distance forward 
to Cape Race, whose natural bastion served for centuries as the uni- 
versal landfall of all American voyages. 
Newfoundland is an “island of the sea,” if ever there was one. 
Nowhere else does the sea enter so intimately into the life of a country and 
a people, calling—always calling—loudly along a thousand miles of 
surf-washed coastline, echoingly up a hundred resounding fiords that 
search out the very heart of the land, whisperingly through a thousand 
snug little lisping tickles—but calling, always calling its sons away to 
the fishing grounds, east and north and west, and sometimes to the 
seafaring ends of the earth. 
Newfoundland is as large as Wales and Ireland put together; yet 
it stands in an actual contraction of the mouth of the St. Lawrence, 
which is four hundred miles across from Battle Harbour to Cape Breton. 
Inside, the Gulf is another hundred miles wider again, between Labrador 
and Nova Scotia, and large enough to hold England and Scotland. 
So the entire mouth of the St. Lawrence could easily contain the whole 
