Our Nation's Birthday. July 1St, 1867.
By Pamela S. Vining, (J. C. Yule)
Ring out your glad peals of rejoicing!
Wake Music's enlivening strain!
Let the sound float abroad o'er your waters,
And echo through valley and plain;
From the shores of the far-distant Fundy,
To the lakes of the limitless West,
Let the sound of a People's exulting
Go forth in its joyous unrest!
For a great Christian Nation, this morning,
From fragments disjointed made one,
With the laws and the speech of old England,
Looks up to the new-risen sun;
And, scarce conscious as yet of her mission -
Of the wealth of her young, earnest life -
Starts out in the march of the nations,
To a future with perils how rife!
Yet who shall not hope for that future -
God's wide-open Book in her hand,
With her sturdy and truth-loving yeomen,
Her broad-spreading acres of land? -
And who does not welcome the rising
Of a new star of promise this morn,
Whose beams shall illumine the darkness
Of millions that yet are unborn?
Then hail we, in songs of rejoicing,
Our father-land over the sea,
Britannia, pride of the ocean,
The home of the gallant and free! -
Hail, Queen of dominions that girdle
The world like an emerald zone,
VICTORIA, Head of three Empires,
Meek Sovereign of Earth's proudest throne!
And hail to our new-born Dominion!
Hail, Canada, happy and blest!
May thy flag ever wave o'er the freest,
Most glorious clime of the West;
Be freedom thy watchword, and Onward,
Thy motto, still cherished and true,
And ever abroad on the breezes
Float thy time-honored "RED, WHITE AND BLUE."