Aurora-Borealis.
Commemorative of the Dissolution of Armies at the Peace.
(May, 1865.)
What power disbands the Northern Lights
After their steely play?
The lonely watcher feels an awe
Of Nature’s sway,
As when appearing,
He marked their flashed uprearing
In the cold gloom—
Retreatings and advancings,
(Like dallyings of doom),
Transitions and enhancings,
And bloody ray.
The phantom-host has faded quite,
Splendor and Terror gone—
Portent or promise—and gives way
To pale, meek Dawn;
The coming, going,
Alike in wonder showing—
Alike the God,
Decreeing and commanding
The million blades that glowed,
The muster and disbanding—
Midnight and Morn.
The Released Rebel Prisoner.[[18]]
(June, 1865.)
[18] For a month or two after the completion of peace, some thousands of released captives from the military prisons of the North, natives of all parts of the South, passed through the city of New York, sometimes waiting farther transportation for days, during which interval they wandered penniless about the streets, or lay in their worn and patched gray uniforms under the trees of Battery, near the barracks where they were lodged and fed. They were transported and provided for at the charge of government.
Armies he’s seen—the herds of war,
But never such swarms of men
As now in the Nineveh of the North—
How mad the Rebellion then!
And yet but dimly he divines
The depth of that deceit,
And superstition of vast pride
Humbled to such defeat.
Seductive shone the Chiefs in arms—
His steel the nearest magnet drew;
Wreathed with its kind, the Gulf-weed drives—
’Tis Nature’s wrong they rue.
His face is hidden in his beard,
But his heart peers out at eye—
And such a heart! like mountain-pool
Where no man passes by.
He thinks of Hill—a brave soul gone;
And Ashby dead in pale disdain;
And Stuart with the Rupert-plume,
Whose blue eye never shall laugh again.
He hears the drum; he sees our boys
From his wasted fields return;
Ladies feast them on strawberries,
And even to kiss them yearn.
He marks them bronzed, in soldier-trim,
The rifle proudly borne;
They bear it for an heir-loom home,
And he—disarmed—jail-worn.
Home, home—his heart is full of it;
But home he never shall see,
Even should he stand upon the spot;
’Tis gone!—where his brothers be.
The cypress-moss from tree to tree
Hangs in his Southern land;
As weird, from thought to thought of his
Run memories hand in hand.
And so he lingers—lingers on
In the City of the Foe—
His cousins and his countrymen
Who see him listless go.
A Grave near Petersburg, Virginia.[[19]]
[19] Shortly prior to the evacuation of Petersburg, the enemy, with a view to ultimate repossession, interred some of his heavy guns in the same field with his dead, and with every circumstance calculated to deceive. Subsequently the negroes exposed the stratagem.
Head-board and foot-board duly placed—
Grassed in the mound between;
Daniel Drouth is the slumberer’s name—
Long may his grave be green!
Quick was his way—a flash and a blow,
Full of his fire was he—
A fire of hell—’tis burnt out now—
Green may his grave long be!
May his grave be green, though he
Was a rebel of iron mould;
Many a true heart—true to the Cause,
Through the blaze of his wrath lies cold.
May his grave be green—still green
While happy years shall run;
May none come nigh to disinter
The—Buried Gun.