On That Memorable July Day, Would You, Kind Reader, Like To Ascend The
Lofty Slope Of Cape Diamond, At The
Hour when the orb of light is shedding
his fierce, meridian rays on the verdant shores and glancing waters below,
And watch with bated breath the gradually increasing gap in the primeval
forest, which busy French axes are cleaving in order to locate the
residence - "L'ABITATION" - of a loved commander, Samuel de Champlain?
Or else would you, in your partiality for the cool of the evening, prefer
from the dizzy summit, where now stands our citadel, to gaze - which would
be more romantic - over the silent strand at your feet, pregnant with a
mighty future, at the mystic hour of eve, when the pale beams of Diana
will lend incomparable witchery to this novel scene. Few indeed the
objects denoting the unwelcome arrival of Europeans in this forest home of
the red man: the prise de possession by the grasping outer barbarian -
for such Champlain must have appeared to the descendants of king
Donnacona. In the stream, the ripple of the majestic St. Lawrence caresses
the dark, indistinct hull of an armed bark: in Indian parlance, a "big
canoe [6] with wings"; on an adjoining height waves languidly with the
last breath of the breeze the lily standard of old France; on the shore, a
cross recently raised: emblems for us of the past and of the present:
State and Church linked together.
Such the objects decernible amid the hoary oaks, nodding pines, and green
hemlocks, below Cape Diamond, on that eventful 3rd of July, 1608.
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