This universal exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' c...laws. It was the English leopard showing his claws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least several... gentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though the words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which m...ight be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has been observed by another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their influence. The British, Irish, and ot...her immigrants, who have settled the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more readily conformed than the Indians to theirs.... Thus, while the descendants of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin still.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions ar...e old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, coming... from New England and being a very green traveler withal,... it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Féreol or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph's; or of a mountain, that it was Bélange or St. Hyacinthe! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin ... and thenceforward, the names of mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry,--Chambly, Longueuil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods towards Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was evident that they had not advanced since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the age, and fairly rep...resented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand years ago. Even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so far advanced as a frontier town in the West three years old. They have no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. If they have got a French phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can expect of them. They are very far from a revolution, have no quarrel with Church or State, but their vice and their virtue is content. As for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a clear idea what or where the States are. The English government has been remarkably liberal to its Catholic subjects in Canada, permitting them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far as was possible for subjects. Their government is even too good for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In no part of the Seventeenth Century could the French be said to have had a foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the ...wild animals which they were exterminating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »