THE VANISHING FAIR
Glad we greet you
May we meet you
Many happy hours again
May each measure
Bring you pleasure
Banishing both grief and pain
May each vision
Prove elysian
So this song shall not prove vain
It has gone in all its glory
Greatest of the fair and grand -
But twill live in song and story,
Mid the memoires of our land
It has mounted, mourned forever
On the fiery wings of flame -
But its beauties fade - no never!
From the fairest page of fame.
It has vanished like the castles
Fancy buildeth in the air;
But not we like weeping vassals.
Wring our hands in mute despair.
For the future lies before us,
Full of glory and of fate -
And the great God watching oerus
Bids us make that future great.
When the world beheld with pity,
As the fiery cyclone's flame
Swept across our smitten city -
Then began its greater fame.
So now may it swept by sorrow,
rise to greater, grander good -
In the light of God's tomorrow
Dawn his day of brotherhood.
When no more with martial measure
Troops shall tramp with heavy tread
Where the miser hoards his treasure
And mad misery hides her dead.
When no more wants frenzied minions
Shall break forth with blood and flame,
Cursing men who count their millions
Covering all with sin and shame.
As we stand above the ashes
of the fairest scenes of time
May each fiery flame that flashes
light to visions more sublime.
May the world behold the beauty
Of the better days to be -
When men wake to faith and duty
And the truth that makes them free.
May the people bow no longer,
At the feet of fraud or gold,
May the truer not the stronger,
Ever more the sceptre hold.
May this motto beaming o'er us
Through the darkness and the light,
Make the future far more glorious, -
Right makes might,
not might makes right
Then an era in its glory,
Greatest, grandest of al time,
May we sing in song and story
To life's melody sublime.
And at last through Heaven's fair portal
By the path the Saviour trod
In the realms of the immortal
May we reach the throne of God.
Where the glory ne'er will vanish
Of the ciry every bright
When the light of love shall banish
Every shadow of earth's night.
May we meet you
There to greet you
Through those never darkening days,
In that morrow
Where no sorrow
Ere shall mingle with our lays,
Where the pleasure
Knows no measure
Save of ceaseless Songs of Praise.
