their mother named them
Practice, Memory, and Song
and what they could not do
could not be done
Combines Tom Thomson's Wildflowers (1915) with a plate from Royal Academy Pictures and Sculpture and a fragment from A History of Canada, Illustrated, edited by W. H. Withrow (1876).
The story
Before there were nine Muses there were three. At Mount Helicon, Pausanias reports, they were honoured as Melete (practice), Mneme (memory) and Aoide (song). Their mother was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. The nine of later tradition came afterward.
The collage combines Tom Thomson's Wildflowers (1915), a plate from Royal Academy Pictures and Sculpture, and a fragment from a history of Canada edited by W. H. Withrow (1876). Withrow (1839–1908) was born in Toronto, a Methodist minister who edited the Canadian Methodist Magazine for more than thirty years.