Your picture hanging on my neck, Up with my men I rushed,— And then my horse, "The Lady Bess," The blood of battle in my veins (A blue-coat dragged me out)— But I remembered you; I kissed your picture—did you know? The Twenty-Fourth, my scarred old dogs, Growled back, "He'll put us through; "We'll take him in our arms: "Our picture there-the girl he loves The foe was silenced-so were we, I lay upon the field, Among the Twenty-Fourth; Your picture, shattered on my breast, A SUMMER NIGHT. I feel the breath of the summer night, The trees, the vines, the flowers are astir The white moths flutter about the lamp, Enamored with light; And a thousand creatures softly sing A song to the night! But I am alone, and how can I sing Come, Night! unveil the beautiful soul ON MY BED OF A WINTER NIGHT On my bed of a winter night, Deep in a sleep, and deep in a dream, What care Ì for the wild wind's scream? What to me is its crooked flight? On the sea of a summer's day, Wrapped in the folds of a snowy sail, What care I for the fitful gale, Now in earnest, and now in play? What care I for the fitful wind, That groans in a gorge, or sighs in a tree? Groaning and sighing are nothing to me; For I am a man of steadfast mind. R. H. Jaddanfo ABRAHAM LINCOLN. A HORATIAN ODE. Not as some great captain falls That push his dread designs To doom, by some stray ball struck dead: Or, in the last charge, at the head Of his determined men, Who must be victors then. Nor as when sink the civic great, The safer pillars of the State, Whose calm, mature, wise words With no such tears as e'er are shed Above the noblest of our dead Do we to-day deplore The man that is no more. Our sorrow hath a wider scope, Too strange for fear, too vast for hope, That waits-what is to come! Not more astounded had we been And murdered while we slept! We woke to find a mourning earth, Such thunderbolts, in other lands, No Cæsar he whom we lament, Sent, it would seem, to do Not by the weary cares of State, Which, often done in vain, Not in the dark, wild tide of war, In awful anarchy; Four faithful years of mortal strife, Which slowly drained the nation's life, (Yet for each drop that ran There sprang an armèd man !) Not then; but when, by measures meet, By victory, and by defeat, By courage, patience, skill, The people's fixed "We will" Had pierced, had crushed Rebellion dead, At last, when all was well, He fell, O how he fell! The time, the place, the stealing pace, It is a hideous dream! A dream? What means this pageant then? Who speak not when they meet, The flags half-mast that late so high (The stars no brightness shed, The black festoons that stretch for miles, (No house too poor to show The cannon's sudden, sullen boom, The bells that toll of death and doom, The rolling of the drums, The dreadful car that comes? |