“In these five weeks you have given me a new strength and inspiration which I know will always help me in the future,” she told Canadians. “For that, I thank you and say, not good-bye, but au revoir.”

You can read her entire address below.

Princess Elizabeth: For five weeks we have travelled through this vast and splendid land of Canada, and now we have once more to the Atlantic. Tomorrow we shall sail for England, and the moment has come when I must say good-bye because, although I am going to a country which is my first home, and, although I am returning to my family and my children, I am also leaving a country which has become a second home in every sense.

Wherever we have been throughout the ten provinces, in your great cities, in your towns, in your villages, and indeed in almost every mile that we have travelled through fields, forests, prairies and mountains, we have been welcomed with a warmth of heart that has made us feel how truly we belong to Canada.

Nor is it easy to say thank you, because no words of mine can express what I should like to tell you. We have seen and heard so much that has moved our imaginations and touched our hearts.

We shall take with us memories that will always draw us back to this country; the towering buildings of your big cities and the charm of your smaller communities, the blue skies and golden colours of autumn – or, as I am now learning to call it, the fall – and the trees and fields beneath the first snow of winter – all the beauty and majesty of Canada. I thank you having shown me these things. I thank you, too, for the glimpse you have given me of the greatness of this nation and the even greater future which is within its grasp.

I have seen this future in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of your children and have heard it in their voices. For as long as I live, I shall remember and cherish fondly the greetings which came to us each day from those young people. I pray that their lot in this land will always continue to be a happy one.

I am well aware that the acclaim you have given us, which has often seemed to me to have the breadth and immensity of the sea, has had a far deeper meaning in it than a personal welcome.  And this has often made me think of the words spoken by the Governor General (Lord Alexander) in Ottawa during the first days of our visit. He said then that the link with the Crown was a thing of real and tangible strength and one of the most important factors in united the people of the Commonwealth into one great brotherhood. You have shown me the reality of this, and I thank you for it.

Destiny has given me the privilege of being able to live my life for the service of that brotherhood; in these five weeks you have given me a new strength and inspiration which I know will always help me in the future. For that, I thank you and say, not good-bye, but au revoir.caption id="attachment_1107441" align="alignleft" width="400" Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, during their 1951 tour of Canada/captionArthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.