Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
NEW YORK: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square 1866.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, by Harper & Brothers, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
The Battle-Pieces in this volume are dedicated to the memory of the THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND who in the war for the maintenance of the Union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers.
The events and incidents of the conflict—making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war—from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind.
The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward wilds have played upon the strings.]
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Herman Melville
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War.
The Portent.
Contents.
Verses Inscriptive and Memorial
Misgivings.
Apathy and Enthusiasm.
The March into Virginia,
Lyon.
Ball’s Bluff.
Dupont’s Round Fight.
Donelson.
The Cumberland.
In the Turret.
A Utilitarian View of the Monitors Fight.
Shiloh.
The Battle for the Mississipppi.
Malvern Hill.
Battle of Stone River, Tennessee.
Running the Batteries,
Stonewall Jackson.
Stonewall Jackson.
Gettysburg.
The House-top.
Look-out Mountain.
Chattanooga.
The Armies of the Wilderness.
On the Photograph of a Corps Commander.
The Battle for the Bay.
Sheridan at Cedar Creek.
In the Prison Pen.
The College Colonel.
At the Cannon’s Mouth.
The March to the Sea.
The Fall of Richmond.
The Surrender at Appomattox.
A Canticle:
The Martyr.
“The Coming Storm:”
Aurora-Borealis.
“Formerly a Slave.”
The Apparition.
Magnanimity Baffled.
America.
Verses
Inscriptive and Memorial
On the Home Guards
Inscription
The Fortitude of the North
On the Men of Maine
An Epitaph.
Inscription
The Mound by the Lake.
On the Slain at Chickamauga.
An uninscribed Monument
On Sherman’s Men
On the Grave
A Requiem
On a natural Monument
Commemorative of a Naval Victory.
Presentation to the Authorities,
The Returned Volunteer to his Rifle.
The Scout toward Aldie.
Lee in the Capitol.
A Meditation:
Attributed to a northerner after attending the last of two funerals from the same homestead—those of a national and a confederate officer (brothers), his kinsmen, who had died from the effects of wounds received in the closing battles.
A Meditation.
Supplement.