32 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
.... they to me 
Were foreign, as when seamen at the dawn 
Descry a land far off and know not which. 
So I approached uncertain; so I cruised 
Round those mysterious islands, and beheld 
Surf and long ledges and loud river bars, 
And from the shore heard inland voices call. 
And, in the selfsame way, I welcome the spell of the Laurentian 
sea, off shores that have borne her company since before the very 
peopling of her waters. 
Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather 
Than forecourts of Kings, and her outermost pits than the streets where men gather 
Inland, among dust, under trees—inland where the slayer may slay him 
Inland, out of reach of her arms and the bosom whereon he must lay him. 
His Sea at the first which betrayed—at the last which shall never betray him, 
His Sea that his being fulfils— 
So, and no otherwise, so and no otherwise, hillmen desire their hills. 
The long, bare Labrador coast line becomes less thinly wooded as 
it runs south-west; and, every now and then, it is vividly brightened 
by a magnificent seascape. The big, bewildered rivers of the interior 
generally find a decided course to run some time before they reach 
salt water, and come down strengthened by each tributary and quickened 
by every rapid till they are eager to slash their way into the thick of 
the opposing tidal streams of the St. Lawrence. The last of them is the 
greatest of all. The Saguenay is a river and a fiord both in one. Five 
large and many smaller rivers run into Lake St. John; but only one 
runs out, and that one is the Saguenay. Through its tumultuous Grand 
Discharge it soon rushes down nearly three hundred feet to sea level, 
where it enters its fiord and ebbs and flows its remaining sixty miles 
in a stream a thousand feet deep between precipitous Laurentian 
banks two thousand feet high. Its flood currents are comparatively 
weak; but on the ebb of a full spring tide it comes straight down with 
tremendous force and without a single check, over a mile wide and a 
hundred fathoms deeper than the St. Lawrence, till its vast impetuous 
mass suddenly charges full tilt against the submarine cliffs that bar 
its direct way out to sea. The baffled rapids underneath shoot madly 
to the surface, through which they leap in a seething welter of whirl- 
pools and breakers, to dash themselves, with renewed fury, against all 
surrounding obstacles. A contrary gale, when this tide is running its 
worst—and there’s war to the death between the demons of sea and 
sky in all that hell of waters. 
But this is at the inland end of the estuary. The seaward end 
meets the Gulf round the shores of Anticosti, between three and four 
hundred miles below the Saguenay. To whom can Anticosti be a land 
