My Country Poem by Samuel Alfred Beadle

My Country Thou dearer and grander than all other earth,
With clime sweet and balmy, fair land of my birth;
May valiant thy youth grow, more stalwart, more brave,
Till ne’er a poor laggard, nor coward, nor slave
Is seen in thy valleys, nor met on thy hills,
Where babbles the brook, or the bright dew distills.

Oh, Country of mine! May thy humblest son be
Ever true to thy genius, 'brave, happy and free.'
May palsied the hand grow that strikes not for thee
When traitors would spoil thee, thou land of the free;
And the alien who dares to invade thy domain,
By the sword let him fall, and from sleep with the slain
Let him never awake in the morning to greet
The daisies that bloom o’er his dank winding sheet;
And freedom, my Country’s great boon to the world,
Let me die on the day that thy banners are furled.

I love thee, adore thee, my Country, I do;
Thy faults, though, are many, 'in pulpit and pew,'
The work of the vicious, the mean and the vain,
Who, vile in their motive and weak in their brain,
Forget that the law is the strength of the brave,
And the man who would break it worse than a slave.
But thou art my Country, still grand and sublime,
The noblest in genius, the fairest in clime.