Classic Poem

Over the Great Divide they come to-day;
A mighty human stream of sturdy tone;
A stream whose robust flood shall wash away
The forest monarch from her ancient throne.
Here is a land with measure like the sea;
An Eden for a giant race of men:
Columbia of the Briton, great and free!
Where shall we look upon her kind again?

The long, deep sleep is over; now her limbs
Move in the vigor of the sun's incline.
Her people shall grow like her, and their hymns
Shall breathe a solemn beauty from her pine.
Their harness now is on the daring stream;
Their roads of steel move thund'rous through the lands;
And on the stillness of Creation's dream
New harmonies awaken from their hands.

Here Saxon law preserves an ordered state:
Here lordly ways renew the laggard soul.
Who once shall enter through this open gate
May start a fairer chapter in life's scroll.
Here lovers of the dew, and dawn, and flowers,
Who scale the mountains in their daily prayers,
May bind the sheaf of all the coming hours
And walk with Beauty up her altar stairs.

Here hosts shall come from every sluggish clime,
And quaff the cup that nursed the giant tree.
And here shall palsied limbs reclaim from time
The old, sweet hours of early ecstasy.
And here, where now the eagle slowly wheels
Above a foaming torrent, shall leap high
The temples of a city, at whose heels
The lean, swift hounds of Progress long shall cry.

Columbia of the Briton, great and fair;
When shall we look upon thy kind again?
Of all our lands thou art the last to bear
The arch triumphal, for the hosts of men.
From where Elias guards thy virgin gold
To proud Victoria, with her queenly grace,
The morrow's sun shall witness thee unfold
The thousand hidden beauties of thy face.

Great Artist of this canvas, which the day
Doth gaze upon the longest; in thy brush,
And on thy palette, what creative play
Fired this cold torrent with the gloaming's blush.
The prairie lands are God's plain speech; but here
Is writ, in stone, a poem by His hand;
Against whose glory Stratford's daring seer
Might fling his treasures like a grain of sand.