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| MORNING, lighting all the prairies, | |
| Once of old came, bright as now, | |
| To the twin cliffs, sloping wooded | |
| From the vast plain’s even brow: | |
| When the sunken valley’s levels | 5 |
| With the winding willowed stream, | |
| Cried, ‘Depart, night’s mists and shadows; | |
| Open-flowered, we love to dream!’ | |
| |
| Then in his canoe a stranger | |
| Passing onward heard a cry; | 10 |
| Thought it called his name and answered, | |
| But the voice would not reply; | |
| Waited listening, while the glory | |
| Rose to search each steep ravine, | |
| Till the shadowed terraced ridges | 15 |
| Like the level vale were green. | |
| |
| Strange as when on Space the voices | |
| Of the stars’ hosannahs fell, | |
| To this wilderness of beauty | |
| Seemed his call ‘Qu’Appelle? Qu’Appelle?’ | 20 |
| For a day he tarried, hearkening, | |
| Wondering, as he went his way, | |
| Whose the voice that gladly called him | |
| With the merry tones of day. | |
| |
| Was it God, who gave dumb Nature | 25 |
| Voice and words to shout to one | |
| Who, a pioneer, came, sunlike, | |
| Down the pathways of the sun? | |
| Harbinger of thronging thousands, | |
| Bringing plain, and vale, and wood, | 30 |
| Things the best and last created, | |
| Human hearts and brotherhood! | |
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