VIII
Noon of the night was come; and over the field sacrificial,
Over the trampled corn, and the broken trees, and the horror,—
Horror of soulless pain of the beasts that perish unknowing,
Horror of human ruin, the shattered sheaths of the spirit,
Horror men pray to forget, and the tongue refuses to tell it,—
Now was the taintless light of the large moon shed out of heaven,
Glory unchanged as the Face of the Father of Lights, to whom upward
Gropes the groaning world.
On the sweet summer grass in the moonlight,
Long, by the tent of his leader, a watcher lay patiently waiting,
Waiting the great Gray Captain, so many times hailed as the victor
On those fields foregone; and the far-away cities had feared him.
Ever with wild lost cry the whippoorwill cried in the woodland.
Late, through the light of the moon, and the flickering shadow of branches,
Lee came riding alone, the beloved magnanimous chieftain,
All alone with defeat in the lucent night and the silence.
Slowly he rode, as one who rides by the bier of a soldier,
Hearing the muffled drums and the sob of a martial sorrow;
Slowly he rode, with downcast head, and the deep moon-shadow
Lay underneath his brows. At the last, from his horse, overwearied,
Hardly he might dismount; on the saddle heavily flinging
One lax arm, he stood awhile without word to the other;
Moveless, horse and man, as if by the art of the sculptor
Wrought in enduring bronze for an everlasting remembrance.
Still in his brain, unbidden, labored the pitiless hammers
Forging the things to be; and he saw the train of the wounded,
Mile upon mile of moan, waggon to waggon succeeding,
Crawl like a crippled snake painfully toward the Potomac;
Saw his crippled Cause, as she dragged her way in the distance
Dim, through fields of fire to a last sad field of surrender.
—Memory, passionate, proud, sprang of a sudden resurgent;
Swiftly he lived again the day, and beheld his Virginians
Splendidly sweep to the shock that the land shall remember forever;
Flashed the ardent eyes, and the spell of his silence was broken.
Proudly he spoke of the charge, in a voice that deepened and trembled
Naming dear names of the dead; then turned to the task of the living,
Motioned to enter the tent, and delivered the trust of the morrow.
So the spark of pride, in the heart of the leader beloved,
Kindled a fresh, false hope; and he sat by the flare of the candle
Planning the morrow’s course, and retrieval, if haply it might be.
(Under the same clear moon, by the flow of the far Mississippi,
Grant was waking too, the invincible taciturn soldier
Chosen of fate; in his tent, by the candle-light feeble and fitful,
Writing the final terms of the longed-for surrender of Vicksburg.)
Stars swept on, meanwhile, in their still, predestinate pathways;
Mornward wheeled the world; and Time, inexhaustible Mother,
Bore to us once again the Day of the birth of a Nation
Sprung from the life-blood of heroes, and consecrated to Freedom.
Guns of the Gettysburg heights, we hear you as out of the distance:
Shall we not understand? Ye spake, in your awful contending,
Words ye spake through the cloud, with austere oracular voices,
Mighty reverberant watchwords of Titan-forces in conflict:
Crying, “The sundered stars!” and replying “The heavens in their clusters,
Led in the lines of law, and linked in their differing glory
Star unto star to the end, until God folds them up as a vesture!”
Crying, “Fit rule of the Few, and a serfdom meet for the Many!”
Thundering out of the smoke, as the Voice on the summit of Sinai,—
Then on the great Third Day, when the trumpet was loud, and the lightnings
Leaped in the mount, and the people fell down at the Voice of Jehovah,—
Thundering out of the smoke with the final august proclamation:
“Nay! but the larger Hope, and the limitless future of Manhood!”
(Nathless a nation elect, a people led forth out of bondage,
Led of the cloud and led of the fire, and upheld in the battle,
Borne upon wings of eagles, and saved in the midst of the waters,
Made to them gods of gold, even there, in the desert of Sinai.)
Guns of the Gettysburg heights, we hear you as out of the distance:
Cease not to roll, vast Echoes! Reverberate solemn, immortal!
Speak to us out of the past of the splendor of valor triumphant,
Speak of the splendor of valor transcending defeat, of the manhood
Tried to the utmost, and true to some lofty and ultimate brightness
Secretly set above self: O speak, that we too in our measure,—
Fallen on diverse days, far otherwise tempted and tested,—
Work the Eternal Will, in the chaos a force of salvation,
Motes of the dust as it streams, yet touched with the light of God’s purpose!