North Carolina State Toast

North Carolina State Toast

"A Toast" was adopted by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1957:

Here's to the land of the long leaf pine,
The summer land where the sun doth shine,
Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great,
Here's to "Down Home," the Old North State!
Here's to the land of the cotton bloom white,
Where the scuppernong perfumes the breeze at night,
Where the soft southern moss and jessamine mate,
'Neath the murmuring pines of the Old North State!
Here's to the land where the galax grows,
Where the rhododendron's rosette glows,
Where soars Mount Mitchell's summit great,
In the "Land of the Sky," in the Old North State!
Here's to the land where maidens are fair,
Where friends are true and cold hearts rare,
The near land, the dear land, whatever fate,
The blessed land, the best land, the Old North State!

Read more about North Carolina State Toast:  Uses

Famous quotes containing the words north, carolina, state and/or toast:

    “A brush had left a crooked stroke
    Of what was either cloud or smoke
    From north to south across the blue;
    A piercing little star was through.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    “Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
    —Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)

    “Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “You make a toast for tomorrow
    and smash the cup,
    letting your false women lap the dish I had to fatten up.”
    —Anne Sexton (1928–1974)