I greet thee, brave and coming year!
⁠With thy unwritten, snowy page,
And dash away the unshed tear
⁠Would dim thee with its dull presage!

Hope dances from her dewy bower
⁠Thy early footstep to beguile;
And Love, as fresh as Eden's flower,
⁠Shall wave thee onward with a smile.

Why carry to thy record fair
⁠The cares, the sorrows, buried, past?
Let them float backward on the air,
⁠And perish like the ocean blast.

Despair our speech has iron-bound,
⁠The stoutest heart has often quailed;
We've flouted Fortune as she frowned,
⁠But was it Fate, or we, who failed?
 
Oft Destiny holds this surprise.
⁠Fate, smiling, slowly drops her mask;
Our pain was blessing in disguise,
⁠And health was hidden in the task.

We weave but blindly at the loom.
⁠Nor see the picture, save in parts;
Not ours to mark the gleam or gloom.
⁠But labour on with patient hearts.

When the bright angel overhead
⁠The soul-wrought tapestry unfurls.
Perhaps the tears we slowly shed
⁠May gleam amid the gold like pearls.

The sorrow which has crushed the life,
⁠A lily blooms, on azure field;
And daily care and toil and strife
⁠In bud and flower may stand revealed.

One thing is left us undisturbed —
⁠We still can work and love and give.
No matter how the life's perturbed.
⁠If, living, wc learn how to live.

Then come, thou young and sturdy year,
⁠Come with proud port, and step elate!
If dawn is dark, noon may be clear:
⁠Come, give us heart for any fate!

There is a land, of every land the pride,
Beloved by heaven o'er all the world beside;
Where brighter suns dispense serener light,
And milder moons emparadise the night;
A land of beauty, virtue, valour, truth,
Time-tutored age, and love-exalted youth.
The wandering mariner, whose eye explores
The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting shores,
Views not a realm so bountiful and fair,
Nor breathes the spirit of a purer air;
In every clime the magnet of his soul,
Touched by remembrance, trembles to that pole;
For in this land of heavens peculiar grace,
The heritage of natures noblest race,
There is a spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest,
Where man, creations tyrant, casts aside
His sword and sceptre, pageantry and pride,
While in his softened looks benignly blend
The sire, the son, the husband, brother, friend.

Here woman reigns; the mother, daughter, wife,
Strew with fresh flowers the narrow way of life!
In the clear heaven of her delightful eye,
An angel-guard of love and graces lie;
Around her knees domestic duties meet,
And fireside pleasures gambol at her feet.

Where shall that land, that spot of earth be found?
Art thou a man? — a patriot? — look around;
Oh, thou shalt find, howe'er thy footsteps roam,
That land thy country, and that spot thy home!

A blue-eyed child that sits amid the noon,
⁠O'erhung with a laburnum's drooping sprays,
Singing her little song, while softly round
⁠Along the grass the chequered sunshine plays.

All beauty that is throned in womanhood,
⁠Facing a summer garden's fountained walks,
That stoops to smooth a glossy spaniel down,
⁠To hide her flushing cheeks from one who talks.

A happy mother with her fair-faced girls,
⁠In whose sweet spring her youth again she sees,
With shout, and dance, and laugh, and bound, and song,
⁠Stripping an autumns orchard laden trees.

An aged woman in a wintry room —
⁠Frost on the pane, without the whirling snow —
Reading old letters of her far-off youth,
⁠Of sorrows past, and joys of long ago.