Wide swells aloft the snowy sail,
New life comes flowing on the gale.
Joy! joy! our exile all is past!
We're homeward bound, homeward at last!
Ill fates are strong, but God is stronger;
The loved that wait shall wait no longer;
Our wake is white with happy foam,
And blithe the skies to fan us home.
O bliss of friendship, bliss of heaven!
O heart of love, earth's angel leaven!
The speed of winds is in your feet,
Soon hands will join and lips will meet.
Now through our land roll far and wide
War's lurid flame and crimson tide;
But glory blushes through her woe,
And both to share with joy we go.
Farewell, grim North! Possess thy throne,
And reign amid thy bergs alone;
Now turn our hearts to truer poles,
To native shores and kindred souls.
Ill fates are strong, but God is stronger;
The loved that wait shall wait no longer;
Our wake is white with happy foam,
And blithe the skies to fan us home.
September 1.—The Gulf had waylaid us, with a fierce storm in readiness. Our reckoning was wrong; we just escaped going ashore in the pitchy darkness; and, to mend all, the ship took fire! The flames were soon quenched, but St. Lawrence Neptune kept trying to put them out for twelve hours afterward; and such a drenching! But here we are between the shores of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Isle. Fort Mulgrave, two miles away over the calm water and beneath the floods of sunshine, looks like a little paradise, (painted white,) after all my reviling it. And fields, too!—green fields and forests! Could one ever again wish more pleasure than to look on swarded fields and wooded hills? Yes,—besides this, the pleasure of remembering Labrador!
FOOTNOTES:
[C] Possibly sienite. I omitted to make a note, and speak from recollection. If sienite, very hard, the quartz element predominating, as the feldspar does farther north.