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Excerpt from Eos: An Epic of the Dawn and Other Poems Why then do I publish these things? I am probably not so vain as I was in my twenty-third year. I have learned to be afraid of nothing but God and wrong-doing, and hold it cowar dice to shrink from endeavour thro' fear of failure. I am a north-west man, and I think the cultivation of taste and imagination as important as the raising of grain. The raising of grain will bring us wealth, but intellectual progress, on which again the highest development of our material re sources depends, will be slow unless all the faculties of the mind are stimulated. The greatest merchants the world ever saw Were highly cultivated men, great and discriminating patrons of literature, with not merely a keen eye to the profit of a commercial transaction, but a quick and true senseof literary excellence; and I rejoice to know we have on many of our farms educated men, and that the Saskatchewan can boast of a successful merchant who has won a high place in the ranks of Canadian poets. We need in Canada generally a intellectual air; redemption from the domination of sciolists, with hearts often as contracted as their culture; the consciousness that we have within ourselves all that can make a great people; and every step towards the creation of a Canadian literature tends to hasten the new and better era in whose advent I believe. The late Mr. Arnold denounced the English Philistine the Phil stine is not the pest we have to complain of. Wherever we turn we are met by people without respect for decency or truth. The Philis'tine of Arnold is a man with inherited ideas, dominated by prejudice and intolerant of enlightenment. But while thankful for brilliant and instructed publicists, we cannot deny that we have gorillas who presume to instruct mankind on every su'bj ect, and express what they call public opinion, whose teaching is degrading, and the weapons of whose warfare are calumny and lies. About the Publisher Forgotten Bo