The Chinese garden and summer-house, the fruit-
laden trees, and river with overhanging willows; the rustic bridge
with the three long-robed figures passing over it; the boat floating
upon the water and the doves flying in the perspectiveless sky--who
does not remember them all?
Lady de Tilly, like a true gentlewoman, prized her china, and
thought kindly of the mild, industrious race who had furnished her
tea-table with such an elegant equipage.
It was no disparagement to the Lady de Tilly that she had not read
English poets who sang the praise of tea: English poets were in
those days an unknown quantity in French education, and especially
in New France until after the conquest. But Wolfe opened the great
world of English poetry to Canada as he recited Gray's Elegy with
its prophetic line,--
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave,"
as he floated down the St. Lawrence in that still autumnal night to
land his forces and scale by stealth the fatal Heights of Abraham,
whose possession led to the conquest of the city and his own heroic
death, then it was the two glorious streams of modern thought and
literature united in New France, where they have run side by side to
this day,--in time to be united in one grand flood stream of
Canadian literature.
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