[ woop] LAURENCIANA 41 
are racing along the surface. And then the storm—the splendid, 
thrilling storm:—the roar, the howls, the piercing screams, the 
buffetings, the lulls—those lulls in which you hear the swingeing lash 
on shore and the hoarse anguish of the excoriated beach:—and then 
the swelling, thunderous crescendo and the culminating crash. And, 
after that, the wind diminishes, little by little, and finally dies away. 
And, when it ceases, all the choral waters sing again. And when these, 
in their turn, have played their part, I hear the half-muffled gurgle 
that tells me the tidal cave is almost full. And, at the Mast, I hear the 
reeds and sedges rustle softly, as the end of the flood quivers between 
their stems; and tide, and reed, and sedge, and the lipping on the sand, 
the purl of the canoe, and the silken, whispering eddies from my paddle, 
all mingle, faint, and melt away once more into the silence out of which 
they came. 
VIII. This is the voice I hear so often—the natural “voice of 
many waters,” which, like the divine one that spoke in revelation, 
also proceeds out of a throne. For the St. Lawrence, this King of 
Waterways, is more than royal, more, even, than imperial—it is the 
acknowledged suzerain of every other waterway, from the Mountains 
to the Sea, and from the Tropics to the Pole. 
The farther afield the old discoverers went the more they found 
that the St. Lawrence was the royal road to the gateways of the 
continent. For its own basin is so intimately connected with the 
subordinate basins of all the other rivers that these men could go, in the 
same canoe, by paddle and portage, from any part of its course to any 
part of the coast—eastward to the Atlantic, between the Bay of Fundy 
and New York; southward, along the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico; 
and northward, either to Hudson’s Bay or, down the Mackenzie, to 
the Arctic Ocean. Only the western divides were too great a barrier. 
But you could come within sight of their summits, which themselves 
looked down on the Pacific. So east and west, and north and south, 
you could go freely, through whole kingdoms of vassal streams, by 
the sole virtue of one passport from the suzerain River. 
And what men they were, who went these endlessly venturesome 
ways, who forced every gate they came to, and then pushed on, un- 
daunted, into other realms of the unknown! 
Cabot and his Englishmen were the first to tread the mainland of 
America, and they did so on Laurentian soil. Their year, 1497, was 
just four centuries before the one in which a Dominion of Canada, 
historically based on the St. Lawrence, sent its representatives to the 
Diamond Jubilee of the Queen of Cabot’s land. And their day, the 3rd 
of July, was the very one on which, a hundred and eleven years later, 
Champlain founded Quebec, from which these representatives sailed. 
