Canada’s distinguished former Prime Minister and First World War leader, Sir Robert Borden, was in a reflective mood on this date in 1933. Long retired from politics, he was up at dawn and later made a private note to file describing the beauty of the moment. These and other reflections of his written as a former Prime Minister were published decades later in the book, Letters to Limbo. You will find his comments on June 10, 1933 below.
Sir Robert Borden: One sleeping in the open and waking at dawn or earlier sometimes sees glorious visions of the sunrise. First there is the faintest radiance in the east as (it) begins to open the portals of the dawn. If there are clouds above the eastern horizon they are flooded with an indescribably beautiful rose tint which gradually deepens into the full splendour of the sunshine bursting into a June morning.
Not long ago I saw island cloud continents in the eastern heavens; and just at sunrise they were touched with a radiance that had not yet reached the earth. One might imagine these island cloud continents to be the abode of the 'Shining Ones', for whom time has no meaning, who still behold the dawn of creation while they see our little planet whirling along in endless movement - keeping time with sister planets and attendant upon her lord and life-giver the Sun who obeys the urge of some greater centre - in fulfilment of a divine and eternal purpose that human intelligence has not yet comprehended or even imagined.
Arthur 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.