V.
Some in silence and some in strife,
Friends, passed to the dim Unknown,
In manhood’s prime or the morn of life,
And I am left alone;
In vain do I essay a song,
On a harp with broken string,
While the hot tears trickle down my cheeks,
And fall in the Old Rock Spring.
A LYRIC FOR LILIAN.
I Bring Thee a Garland.
I bring thee a garland, O, violet-eyed maid
Its exquisite bloom in thy dark locks, I braid.
Love nourished each flower with a sigh and a tear,
And the sigh and the tear
Shall make them more dear,
And bring them new charms with each vanishing year.
I fill thee a goblet—’tis the heart’s purest wine,
Fresh foamed from the wine-press of St. Valentine,
The Rathskeller holds it which sits in the skies,
Whose roseate gleaming
Is bright in its beaming,
As the love-stars which shine in the heav’n of thine eyes.
I bring thee a song, and though humble the strain,
Love glows in each word of the burning refrain.
And oh, that its notes were as wild and as sweet
As the plashing of fountains
Or horns on the mountains,
Or songs which thy dear lips in warblings repeat.
THE STRAWBERRY BOWL
[A private and confidential Epistle to Sam Gaines, Editor of the Hopkinsville New Era. Written for the Kentucky Press Association.]
God might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but certainly he never did.—Izaak Walton.
Ye Salutation.
Bring forth the bowl within whose round
No heart-consuming draught is found,
But berries glittering with the dew
Which south winds o’er the gardens strew,
Sweet souvenirs of Paradise,
With cheeks of flame and breath of spice,
Shedding for one bright hour their glow
O’er life’s long Alpine waste of snow.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
“O that I owned a strawberry bed?”
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As he beheld, in cream inurned,
Great sugared berries, coral red?
If such there be, go, mark him well;
Of berries never let him smell,
Where gathers the church festival
Or rings the merry marriage-bell;
Mark him—as thou wouldst mark a steer
Or swine—by cropping off his ear.
A Walk in the Garden.
Wake, winds of May, yon emerald waves,
Crested with flowers, like sea-foam white,
Where sparkle in their trefoil caves
Long coral reefs of berries bright;
Shaped like a gentle maiden’s heart,
And bleeding as from Cupid’s dart,
The garden’s earliest offering,
Crown-jewels on the brow of Spring;
The berry Izaak Walton loved,
And Downer’s perfect taste approved;
Dispensing odors beatific,
Kentucky, Cumberland, Prolific,
Sharpless, and Monarch of the West,
And rare Charles Downing, last and best
Thy leaves, sweet trefoil! symbols three
Of Faith and Hope and Love shall be;
Fair type of Christian hope to all,
The vine sleeps low ’neath snowy pall;
The resurrection blooms in May,
With flowers and fruits in bright array,
And soaring larks in countless throng
Singing their joyful Easter Song,
And choir of mocking-birds on high
Gray-plumed sopranos of the sky
Ye Revel on Olympus.
Heap high the bowl! Ages ago
Before the birth of Faust or Hoe,
Before New Eras, Posts, and Suns
Gave specials, paragraphs and puns,
When only Mercury bore the news
Around the skies, in winged shoes,
Such genial revels held the gods,
Juno and Jove, and other frauds;
In heaven’s blue crystal urn each night
The stars, like berries, twinkled bright
And the Great Dipper skimmed the cream
Where poured the Milky Way its stream;
Deserted is the Olympic hill;
Heaven, stars, girls, strawberries, bless us still
Ye Invocation.
Lord, we adore thy matchless bounty
And grace which, after giving birth
To sun and moon and stars and earth.
Gave us a land of rarest worth
And cast our lot in Christian County!
’Mid meek-eyed Jerseys, guileless mules,
Hopkinsville peaches, Public Schools,
Tobacco farms and gilt-edged bonds,
Wheat-fields and sheep and fishing-ponds,
Coveys of quail and double barrels,
Opossums, pheasants, doves and squirrels,
Damsels whose pamphanescent eyes,
If stars were quenched would light the skies;
And for to-night, to make us merry,
Provided Izaak Walton’s berry,
Ten inches round in lawful measure,
The garden’s glory, pride and treasure—
Nor Brenner’s brush nor Prentice’s pen
Could tell their worth—and so, Amen!
Ye Picnic.
Fill high the bowl! In blissful vision
We wander over fields Elysian,
Through ever-lengthening colonnades,
Of whispering elms and beechen shades;
Grave manhood’s cares are cast away,
And all are boys again, to-day
By one sure sign we know each other—
“The strawberry mark!—Our long lost brother!”
While all discourse on sylvan pipe
Of golden cream and berries ripe,
Or sound on Memory’s silver horn,
“I too was in Arcadia born!”
Sooth, ’tis a goodly sight to see
The revellers’ mutual ministry:
Stanton shall drive the Jersey cow,
Sam Gaines shall cause her milk to flow,
Logan shall hold her by the tail,
And Kelly bear the foaming pail;
Woodson shall crush the crystal ice,
Johnston hand spoons, all polished nice,
The Courier-Journal pass the berries,
With brisk champagne and golden sherries
And he shall serve his country best
Who stores most berries ’neath his vest.
By shady glen and waterfall
Our early loves will we recall,
Maids whom no time can ere eclipse,
With strawberry cheeks and sugared lips,
Phantoms which haunt boyhood’s dream,
Life’s fragrant, pure crême de la crême—
Delicious cream, which soured too soon,
And left us with an empty spoon!
Ye Pioneer’s Wild Strawberries.
Master of the Feast:
“Father, thy locks are thin and gray,
Hast thou no legend for us pray?
Sing of the wild strawberry’s flame
When first Kentucky hunters came.”
Old Pioneer:
“’Tis nigh on ninety years, I guess,
By the road called the ‘Wilderness’—
Its story’s told by Captain Speed,
A little book you all should read—
We pioneered to Old Kaintuck,
Woods swarmed with turkey, bear and buck,
And by the ‘Rock Spring’ pitched our tents,
Them times wild strawberries was immense;
We didn’t pick, we scooped ’em up
By bushels, with a bowl or cup;
And when our teams came home at night,
The critters’ legs—they wuz a sight;
Seemed like they’d swum in bloody seas,
The red juice splashed above their knees.
We rode one May-day ’cross the prairie,
Me and my wife and little Mary;
Come to a holler in the ground,
Where lots of strawberries grew around,
And herds of trampling buffalo
Made the red juice in rivers flow
And fill a pool some five foot deep—
Excuse me, pardners; I must weep—
Thanks! My throat is a leetle dry—
God knows I can not tell a lie (Applause)
Our horses slipped and tumbled in,
We swum in juice up to the chin;
A half an hour we rose and sank
At last we scrambled to the bank;
Me and my wife soon came around—“
“She was drowned!” (Groans)
“Yes drowned! My stricken heart, be calm!
Hers is the crown, the harp, the palm—
Thanks, yes if you insist, a dram.
Blood flowed them days like strawberry juice
When Girty let his hell-hounds loose.
One day some Injin squaws allfired—“
Master:
“There, old man, rest. You must be tired.
Share in our feast, Homeric sire;
Thanks to the Muse for such a lyre!”
Ye Silent Toast.
Fill high to-night the strawberry bowl
For friendship’s feast and flow of soul,
Quickly, ere Psyche’s brilliant flight
Shall vanish in the coming night.
Soon shall the parting word be spoken,
Soon friendship’s golden bowl be broken;
Clasp hands and salutation send
To each true-hearted, absent friend;
Nor in our circle be forgot
The masters who before us wrought,
Titans of memorable days:
Penn, with his sheathless falchion’s blaze,
Harney, the dauntless, true, and strong,
And Prentice of the golden song,
Triad whose still ascending track
Flings its long rays of splendor back.
Ye Small Boy’s Downfall.—A Sam.
What spectres from the strawberry bowl
Flit through the galleries of the soul,
With shrill voice crying, “Grieve his heart;
Come like shadows; so depart!”
Strawberry cake, preserves, and jam!
I see thy mild eyes moisten, Sam
Perchance at memory of the closet
Where once was stored the rare deposit,
High ranged upon the topmost shelf,
A skillful mother’s richest pelf.
I see thee steal, at dead of night,
With cat-like footsteps, soft and light;
I see thee open slow the door,
Peep in, and cautiously explore;
I see short Sam the boxes pile,
Humming Longfellow’s psalm the while:
“The heights to which the great have stept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night.”
I hear a sudden scream—a crash—
I see a candle’s fitful flash—
Tableau—A boy with downfallen breeches,
Loud sobs and screams and stinging switches.
Good-night.
Heap high the bowl and pour the cream!
How bright the rosy berries gleam—
Red fruit and Jersey cream upon it,
The colors of my lady’s bonnet.
In hues like these the western sun
Descends to rest when day is done;
And round his flaming couch are rolled
Bright curtained clouds of red and gold.
Not greedily the fruit devour;
Prolong the raptures of the hour;
Stain not with juice your linen fair,
And of the “strawberry nose” beware.
Think of the lovely—the sublime—
Niagara—California’s clime;
The Mammoth Cave—Alaska’s shore,
Where glaciers plunge and billows roar;
Balance each berry in your spoon,
Sink back in a delicious swoon,
And murmur in a Romeo’s sigh:
“I have seen Naples—let me die!”
O, vital sparks of heavenly flame!
Whate’er your lineage, land or name,
Pink buds which Mother Nature clips
From infant cherubs’ finger tips,
Or earth-born babies’ little toes,
Tinted like sea-shell or the rose,
Or notes from songs of home and love,
Which floating to the skies above
Are crystallized in heaven’s pure air
And turn to crimson berries there—
Ambrosial fruit of heavenly birth,
By Ariel’s fingers dropped on earth—
Come o’er me and possess my soul,
Sweet spirit of the Strawberry Bowl!
For all the world’s a strawberry bowl,
Life the red fruit which fills the brim,
The daily papers spoon the whole,
And women are the sugar and cream.
Melrose Garden, May, 1880.
HYMN.
[Sung at the Dedication of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Church, Fairview, Kentucky, November 21, 1886.]
Inscription on a marble tablet in the wall of the church:
Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was born June 3, 1808, on the site of this church. He made a gift of the lot March 10, 1886, to the Bethel Baptist Church, as a thank-offering to the Lord.
Jesus, to thy great name we raise
A house of penitence and praise,
A beacon for the wanderers’ bark,
To guide it home through storm and dark.
Here shall ambition’s fever cease,
Sin’s wretched slaves find sweet release,
And washed in Jordan’s cleansing wave
Rise from the Christian’s mystic grave.
Hence bid our earth-born cares depart,
Heal every aching, bleeding heart,
Dispel the clouds of doubt and dread
And feed us with thy living Bread.
Father, Redeemer, Guide and Friend,
Go with us to our Journey’s end,
Until we hail in Paradise
The nobler Bethel of the skies.
JOHN MORGAN AND HIS MEN.
Dedicated to Mrs. Basil Duke.
Wild disorder, uproar, panic,
Civil war with deeds Satanic
Break Kentucky’s dream—Neutrality—
Everywhere war’s stern reality
Drum and fife and bugle-playing—
Terrors breeding; fears allaying—
For various hopes and fears are rife
In the wild rage of civil strife;
When son and sire in contest stand,
Each loyal to his native land,
Obeying many-voiced command;
One loyal to the stripes and stars—
One faithful to the stars and bars!
There curls the smoke of burning train!
There leaguered stockades fight in vain—
War glows on hill and glen.
Fat cattle to the camp are led,
The farmer mourns his thoroughbred.
They quickly came, as quickly fled;
Swift as an Indian arrow sped—
The Southron’s joy, the Federal’s dread—
John Morgan and his men?
Loved and obeyed by his command,
With woman’s heart and lion’s hand—
The Sydney of the Southern land
John Harper’s thoroughbreds forsake
The turf of Woodford’s old cane-brake;
And walnut, oak and hackberry grove,
To track the bridle paths that rove
High o’er the caves of Edmonson—
The treeless fields without a sun!
And bear the bold Rough Riders on
Where trains are seized and treasures won.
Dark Echo River’s weeping wave
Shall mourn beneath the warrior’s grave,
The dauntless partisan who rode
Right on through storm and snow and flood.
The foe exclaims, “He’s here!” “He’s there!”
Vanished like spectres in the air,
Trackless, save for the empty stall,
Or smoke wreath rising like a pall
Over the commissary’s store,
Where hungry comrades loud deplore
The thunderbolt of Morgan’s raid—
Chief of th’ Invisible Brigade,
Vanished, like morning rainbow, spun
By golden distaff of the sun.
There is bustle and commotion to-night with “Ellen N,”
Fair Ellen, maid of iron stays, beloved of many men,
From a thousand fertile valleys, from many a teeming glen,
She bears great stores on laboring trains to Thomas and his men
The blue-coats down at Nashville have come to do or die,
To battle for the old flag beneath the Southern sky,
And to Ellen’s welcome ministry—they look most wistfully,
She bears souvenirs and messages in her capacious trains,
The maidens of the great Northwest send greetings to their swains,
She has hard-tack, and tobacco, and bacon in her store,
She has cod-fish and dried beef and gingerbread galore,
From Keystone, Empire State, from Indiana’s plains
Ellen speeds them all along in her wide flowing trains,
Bibles and tracts and song-books, and sweet messages from home,
And prayer-books from every church from Geneva to Rome,
From many a Western Valley, from many a quiet glen,
Comes goodly cheer from the kindly hands of buxom Ellen N.
There is trouble on your road to-night, O dauntless Ellen N!
There is panic, there is hurry—’tis John Morgan and his men,
There are bridges burned—the track’s ripped up—some one has cut the wire
And commissary stores go up by thousands in the fire,
A sudden charge at midnight, the long train is in ashes,
The magazine explodes with deafening roar and crashes,
Millions go up like tinder in all-consuming flame,
And Morgan and his men ride off, as quickly as they came.
Nashville and Chattanooga rue,
Divided rations cut in two.
The horseman scathless burned and fled
Their foes went supperless to bed.
They might as well have fought the air
They charged—but Morgan was not there.
His baffled foe, always too slow
To harass or inflict a blow,
Muttered, “For sure the man’s a wizard,
One might as well strike at a blizzard,”
He’s here—he’s gone again—he’s there!
Like exhalation of the air
Waving its strange, uncanny light
O’er grave or dismal swamp at night.
One trait his hottest foe confessed,
“A hero’s heart beats in his breast,
He never strikes a foe when down,
Nor woman ever saw him frown.”
The mean poltroon of later days
Who dons a mask in devious ways,
Black mask and heart, in liver white,
Fleet as a hare in coward flight
And worthy of the hangman’s loop
Ne’er found his like in Morgan’s troop.
They lashed no helpless foeman’s back,
No woman felt his brute attack.
He burned no roof o’er matron’s head,
While sleeping with her babes in bed,
Nor scourged with thorns till shoulders bled.
No town was burned in bandit flame
Till the poltroon Night-riders came,
With bloody threats in unsigned letters
And switches to alarm their betters;
An anarchist of basest soul,
The gallows-tree his fitting goal
Without a hope of reformation
He forces this dilemma on the nation,
Expatriation or Extermination.
Bred in a home of luxury,
The very flower of courtesy,
The pet of good life’s merry whirl,
Kindly and handsome as a girl,
The dread of many a Federal band,
The darling of the Southern land,
Rode Morgan like a Centaur’s self,
But not for vulgar greed or pelf,
Chivalrous men of force and pride,
Sought brave adventures at his side,
How shrewd he struck, how hard his blow
The bravest Federal well might know,
Even while their needed stores were brough
Destruction came as quick as thought.
Victim of Woman’s treachery,
He perished not as the brave should die,
Decoyed to death, unarmed he died.
No friend nor weapon by his side,
Without resistance or a blow,
His death-doom came from heartless foe,
And strong men of heroic heart
Who stooped not to the assassin’s art
Dropped at the news an honest tear
When Morgan after bright career
Unscathed by ball or battle-spear,
Rested at last upon his bier,
And unattended and unshriven
The warrior’s soul went up to Heaven.
No base Night-riders he bequeathed,
When peace her joyful olives wreathed.
Nor placed a mean banditti stamp
Upon the soldiers of his camp.
When truce was called by Grant and Lee
’Neath Appomattox apple tree,
And ’mid the late conflicting bands
Rejoicing Blue and Gray shook hands,
And maidens by no fear oppressed
Clasped warrior lovers to their breast,
When Richmond’s hills echoed no more,
The black-lipped cannon’s horrid roar,
A scene was witnessed there sublime,
A wonder in the halls of Time,
Each soldier to his work returned,
In whom the love of country burned
Some to their former plow and spade,
Some to their shops or honest trade;
Trained by the clinic of the camp
Doctors relit the student’s lamp.
Some to the courts, or in the States’
Grand forum joined the high debates,
Others who learned in the late strife
The vanity of mortal life,
Proclaimed the Gospel’s “Old, old Story”
Their mothers taught long passed to glory,
Leading their audience to Christ
Whose balm for every ill sufficed.
Watering their flocks at Jordan’s springs,
Whose doves bore healing in their wings
Some of the band of Morgan’s fighters,
Swapped swords for pens of ready writers,
And Captains spruce and bearded Colonels
Ruled Times, Gazettes, and Courier-Journals
Some tossed the blazing torch aside,
And ruled the tracks they once destroyed,
Building steel railways far and near;
And Duke who rode with Morgan’s men,
Turns suitor now to “Ellen N.”
Each man who followed Morgan’s fame
Inspired by his heroic name,
His living monument became.
In Gotham’s mighty mart of trade,
Which all of worth and brain invites
The men of Morgan’s cavalcade
Conspicuous walk as shining lights
As walked the men of Washington
When Revolution’s war was done.
In posts of honor now they labor
As when equipped with gun and sabre,
And men exclaim on every hand
“These rode in Morgan’s great Command.
Nor lapse of years shall e’er dispel
The love with which they fondly dwell
On comrades who in battle fell,
Who braved Stone River’s fiery scath,
Or forward pressed on bloody path
Of Shiloh’s field or Nashville’s wrath.
THE WHIPPOORWILL.
Evening mists hang o’er the rill,
Twilight’s lucent dews are falling;
From the copse on yonder hill
The lone whippoorwill is calling;
Soon as glow the Orient fires
Of the new moon’s shining crescent
With a throat that never tires
Cries the bird with song incessant,
“Whippoorwill!”
Piping from its tuneful bill,
“Whippoorwill!”
Does that quick and plaintive cry
Burst from bosom sorrow-laden,
Like the star-told agony
Of a wretched, love-lorn maiden?
Or contemning, like a sage,
Mirthful strains attuned to folly,
Tames it thus the minstrel’s rage
With a song so melancholy?
“Whippoorwill!”
Music soothes our sorrows still,
“Whippoorwill!”
Hearts bereft of hope and light
By the bolt of sorrow riven,
’Neath the friendly vail of night
Tell their griefs to listening heaven;
Like the lonely whippoorwill,
Flying far from daylight’s din,
To some thick and starless shade
Like that which fills the soul within.
“Whippoorwill!”
Night befriends the mourner still
“Whippoorwill!”
Like a hermit in his cell,
Where a holy vow has bound him,
Long the night bird’s vesper bell
Wakes the cloistered shades around him
Sad as love beside the tomb
Of its earliest, deepest sorrow
Wails the bird till twilight’s gloom
Fades away in dawning morrow—
“Whippoorwill!”
And its cry is never still—
“Whippoorwill!”
THE NEW SOUTH.
Dedicated to R. W. Knott, Editor of the Louisville Evening Post
Sweet were my dreams along thy streams,
Old South, in bygone days,
Till war’s red cloud, ’mid thunders loud,
Consumed them in its blaze:
Sewanee’s old plantation scenes,
Where wild bees filled the comb;
The banjo and the moonlight dance
Of old Kentucky Home.
The New South wakes! the New South shakes
The dew-drops from her mane,
For idle grief brings no relief,
The past comes not again;
To manly hearts and patient souls
Heaven sanctifies each loss;
Two angels, Toil and Patience, bear
To Heaven the Southern Cross.
New South! New South! unseal thy mouth,
Thy golden age is come—
Invention’s soaring harmony
And labor’s busy hum.
The Old South dies; with beaming eyes
The New South hastens in;
So boyhood’s toys are cast aside
When manhood’s deeds begin.
A FEVER DREAM.
Ægri somnia vanæ
Fingentur species.—Horace.
Many a league have I traversed to-night,
Many a league in painful flight,
For demons pressed on my bleeding track
And the air with their sounding wings was black
Often, often, they came so near
I felt their hot breath on my ear,
And mad with terror, I bounded on
Till the cock crew out at the glimmering dawn.
Over the rocks, through trackless woods,
O’er bottomless chasms and raging floods,
Through measureless wastes of dreary swamps,
Lit by the fireflies’ fitful lamps,
Where the moccasin coils in scaly spires
’Mong the water-lilies and tangled briars;
Where the spotted toad and the water newt
Lurk in the weeds of the poisonous fen,
And the blue-heron utters its plaintive cry,
And the owl hoots out to the starless sky,
And the foul miasma’s putrid breath
Is filling the air with the taint of death—
Under the Upas tree’s fatal shade
Where death his carnival has made;
Where ghastly corpses taint the day
And the vulture fears to claim his prey;
In the stifling air of the Grotto del Cane
Where the night dews fall like blustering rain—
I fled, nor looked one moment back,
For the ghosts were yelling on my track.
Ah! not the unimprisoned shadows,
Which dwell in the Elysian meadows,
Released from pain, and want, and care,
And doubt and sorrow and despair;
Nor such as timid wanderers meet,
When the moon is struggling under a cloud,
With bony fingers and skeleton feet,
And grinning skulls and ghastly shroud,
But the nameless troop which lawless thought
To the poet’s wildest dream has brought,
The brood which dark remorse might view
When justice comes to claim her due;
Strange somethings of more frightful mien
Than mortal eye has ever seen.
O! sacred sleep, once more descend,
And seal these throbbing, aching eyes,
Thou art the sufferer’s truest friend,
And bringest balm from Paradise,
Distilled from groves which never cast
Their leaves from worm, or winter’s blast.
Hush!—’Twas as if some murmured strain,
Well known in childhood’s happy hours,
Came wafted o’er a desolate plain,
On winds impregnated with flowers,
And then they vanish—like the lambent light
That flashes through a tempest cloud at night
Lo! Dreamland’s terrible array,
Advances still—Away, away!—
Down through the dark Cimmerian glen
Stained with the blood of murdered men,
Far from the beams of the friendly sun
When “deeds without a name” are done,
And the night-hags hold their dance of death
Around the cauldron of Macbeth;
Where the sire fell by the hand of the son—
A stab, a groan, and the crime was done;
Where the duelist sped the ball of death,
And the mother stifled the infant’s breath,
Under yon gloomy cypress’ shade
By the lonely grave of the beautiful maid,
Murdered by him who had betrayed,
Where her spectre glides at dead of night
With clots of gore on her bosom white;
Where on a gibbet the murderer swings
Waving his fleshless arms like wings—
I fled, nor quaked at the hideous sight,
For life and death were in my flight.
Across the burning desert’s waste
Where the path by skeletons is traced,
And the bones of the caravan welter and bleach
As thick as the shells on the ocean’s beach,
Swift as the winged winds I fly,
And my swollen lips are all cracked and dry,
And I plead in vain to the rainless sky,
While my bloodshot eyes from their sockets burst
In the torrid agony of thirst;
But the demons that follow laugh and yell
As they breathe the native blasts of hell.
The simoon’s blast, Oh joy! is past,
And the ocean beach is reached at last!
A storm is out and the wild winds mock
The ship as she drives on a hidden rock,
And the sea-gull screams its piercing dirge
As the dead drift in on the landward surge.
No pause! but quick as thought I lave
My burning limbs in the boiling wave,
Till I reach a cliff in my watery flight
And breathless scale its dizzy height.
The ocean’s roar comes faint and weak
As I cling to the side of the slippery peak,
Watching the wrath of the fearful night
By the fitful flash of tempest’s light.
Lo! how the eyes of the demons glow
As they cleave the boiling waves below!
Yelling at me, their helpless prey
As bloodhounds yell when the stag’s at bay!
They climb! they mount! the demons all,
And the beetling cliff begins to fall—
And I wake with a groan and a smothered scream
To find it all a fever dream
MAJOR BASSETT’S CHASE.
Text—“O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!
How should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight?
—Deuteronomy XXXII, 29, 30
Glenraven’s Night Riders, five hundred strong,
Had finished their riot of outrage and wrong,
They had burned Latham’s warehouse, robbed Italy’s King
(What defense in the courts will the criminals bring?
Who will dare to defend base ingratitude’s sting?);
They have scourged a Kentuckian’s back like a slave,
’Twas the brute deed of cowards, not the just or the brave,
[A]McCool on his shoulders plied an overseer’s lashes
By the light of two warehouses sinking in ashes.
They have dragged helpless maidens from innocent bed,
They have shot through the bedrooms of widows—with lead
These black-handed anarchists of murder and arson
Fired four volleys at a silver haired Methodist parson,
And yelled in derision as their shots rang on air,
“Denounce us again, Sir Priest—if you dare!
Neither for you, nor your Church, nor your God do we care!
They have done all that arson and force could achieve,
And quaking like cowards the outlaws take leave,
Unlike valiant soldiers after manly affray
But like thieves from a hen-roost sneak quickly away.
Out spoke Major Bassett: “The dogs had their day,
And shooting’s a game at which two parties can play,
They surprised us; the cowards have all skulked away.
We’ll follow!” cried Bassett, and off with his mount
Pursued—ten brave men and true were his count.
There was clatter of hoofs down the old Cadiz road,
’Twas a clean pair of heels the Glenravenites showed.
Alas, for the pluck of these minions of night,
Black of mask and of heart, but their livers are white.
“Ride fast!” shrieked the Night Riders’ chief, looking back,
“A thousand giants from Hopkinsville press on our track!
The Mayor has mustered all Company D,
In humanity’s name can such outrages be?
Now is your time to do Latham up brown
And fire him and his followers out of the town!
Damn his turnpikes, on which thirty thousand he spent!
Damn the churches he aided—Hotel, Monument—
(How grandly it towers o’er Confederate graves—
Shall the sons of such heroes be Night Riders’ slaves?)
Damn all such aristocrats, they shall know by the powers,
That after they’ve made it their money is ours!”
Hoboes, loafers and robbers, ride for your lives,
On your crimes the Raven of Glen Raven thrives,
And its horrible croak strikes fear to the land
When it calls to the raid the Night Riders’ band.
But who would have thought that the dogs would shoot back
Real Krag-Jorgensen bullets? Alas and alack!
His words were cut short by a volley of lead—
There were loud shrieks of pain, in all quarters they fled;
The shots of the bandits flew wide of their mark,
As they galloped in terror away in the dark.
Nor halted the maskers in their blood-sprinkled path
To look back on three comrades writhing in death.
Then Bassett assembled his God-fearing squad
And bowing their heads devoutly thanked God
That when Christian men band to battle for Right
One Christian can put a thousand outlaws to flight.
Honest men will always walk off with the cake,
And that is where Moses made no mistake;
And to the Last Judgment all honest men
Will bow to the Decalogue traced by his pen;
For God Himself writes in Mount Sinai’s brief
By Moses His penman, Humanity’s chief,
The Night Rider is coward, assassin, and thief.
Hold fast to Moses! A squad of eleven
Who join hands with Truth, are posted for Heaven,
And the outlaws who ’gainst truth and honor rebel
Must go to their place with the outlaws in Hell.
So we’ll all shout huzza for Bassett and band,
Till they banish the Night Riders out of the land.
Forever shall God’s honest ministers preach
Paul’s heaven-taught doctrine of order and law,
As bold as John Baptist they shall stand in the breach
To battle for Truth and keep villains in awe.
THE TEN BROTHERS.
[On the last day of the Christian County Fair, many years since, the ten sons of Mrs. Rebecca Brown, all excellent horsemen, entered the amphitheater mounted on iron-gray horses. After a fine exercise of horsemanship by the brothers the judges presented their aged mother with a silver cup, amid the loud applause of the vast crowd of spectators.]
’Tis the last afternoon of the old County Fair
The amphitheatre’s thronged for a spectacle rare.
Ten sons of one mother contend for the prize
And a whirlwind of cheering ascends to the skies
’Tis surely a pity that horses and sheep,
Mules, poultry and swine the blue ribbon should keep,
O’er a highly bred strain of true women and men—
If degenerate men rule the State, pray what then?
On ten iron-gray horses they enter the ring,
Ten brothers as graceful as swallows on wing.
The crowd shouts and claps, for county and town
Loved their silver-haired mother, Rebecca Brown.
Let others for cattle and horses seek the prize
The boys she had nursed were more dear in her eyes,
Her sons were her jewels like Cornelia of old,
More precious than Solomon’s rubies and gold,
Each son a true citizen honored of men,
Master workmen are all with plow, anvil or pen.
In pairs and platoons they join and divide,
Ever changing the figure in column they ride,
Firm in the stirrup, with regular motion,
Like flights of wild geese or the billows of ocean,
O Mother! far better than rank, fashion, or wealth
Is the toast all spectators now drink to your health.
“Here’s a health to good mothers, the Angels of home,
Write their names in the Temple of Fame—on the dome!”
Smiling through tears gazed the mother that day,
Her eyes followed each son on his fleet iron-gray,
Thrifty, frugal, and upright was each dutiful one,
In the whole decade not a prodigal son
Precious memories ran back o’er the long vista of years,
Faith’s brilliant rainbow arched her fountain of tears,
Love and hope all commingled with doubts and with fears.
O hour mysterious of omnipotent prayer!
When the fireflies’ carnival flashes in air,
When the Evening Star shines and the meteors glide
She counselled them thus as they knelt by her side:—
“Let no plausible white lie, for gain, soil your lips;
Let the dear sun of Truth be undimmed by eclipse.
God’s commandments be yours, for their number is Ten,
Obey them and be honored of God and of Men,
For ’tis better by far to be honest than rich,
And the King who is false finds his grave in a ditch;
His manhood’s secure in the armour of Truth
Who remembers his Creator in the days of his youth.”
Swift round the ring rode the Ten Brothers Brown,
Till the bugle sounds “Halt!” for award of the crown.
By what rule of the Fair shall the Judges decree?
Horsemen, horses, or mother—to which of the three?
There was strewing of flowers, kerchiefs waving galore
Acclamations round the vast amphitheatre roar
As waves boom aloud ’gainst the rocks on the shore,
As around the grand stand the brothers rode up
The Judges with one voice cried, “Take, O Mother, this cup,
Far better and higher than wealth, rank or beauty,
Your sons are your jewels—take the high prize of Duty,
For Motherhood’s Excellence is guarded secure
While Truth reigns on high and the heavens endure!”
ECHO RIVER.
Through the unpeopled realms of night
We have reached the Echo River;
And our swinging torches’ light
Over its sunless waters quiver—
Shooting their rays athwart the gloom
Of yonder stern, colossal tomb;
Emblazoning the funeral pall
Of night, that drapes the high-arched hall,
So dense, we almost hear it wave
Over the Titan’s rocky grave—
Once the dread Cyclops of the Cave.
What bold Ulysses, standing by,
Gazed on his dying agony,
When, blind and frenzied, he laid down
His scepter and imperial crown,
And yielded up his struggling breath
In this stern catacomb of death;
And felt the icy shiver
That chilled the fever’s fiery parch,
When took his soul its Stygian march
Adown the dark and stony arch
Of gloomy Echo River?
Lone as the tarn, whose sobbing flood
Sighs in some demon-haunted wood,
Its cheerless waters ever run
Without one welcome from the sun;
Without a smile from one lone star
That trembles in the sky afar;
But wend their solitary way,
Secluded from the light of day.
Kind Genii of the mystic wave,
Who guard the portals of the cave,
Gently along this sable tide
Now let our little shallop glide;
And by these weird and shadowy shores
Direct the dusky boatman’s oars,
Until yon night-enshrouded strand
Receives our wandering pilgrim band
High towering, like the rocky walls
Of the leviathan’s ocean halls,
Rises the overshadowing cliff
Above our frail but daring skiff,
Which skims along this lower deep,
Where angry tempests never sweep
Nor polar star affords its ray
To steer us on our trackless way.
And as we slowly sail along,
The plashing oar, the voice of song,
Caught by the Naiads of the waves
And echoed by the vocal caves,
Enchant the pleased yet startled ear
With strains that ring as loud and clear
As the wild mountain music—born
From the lone Alpine shepherd’s horn,
In peals so loud that they affright
The lammergeyer on dizzy height;
And the bold eagle’s trumpet shriek,
Loud-bugled from his thunder beak
And echoed round from peak to peak,
In hollow cadence dies away
Along the mountain river,
When the first stars of evening gray
On the blue waters quiver.
* * * * * * * *
Boom! rings the flashing pistol’s shot!
The sound, by myriad echoes caught,
Roars down the dark aisles of the grot;
Loud as the earthquake demon’s groan,
Peals the terrific thunder-tone—
As if the shrieking blasts of March,
That wrestle with the mountain larch,
Swept down the dark and stony arch
Of glory’s Echo River.
’Tis gone! and now a sad farewell
Unto the listening waves we tell;
Softer than midnight serenade
Sung to the ears of Spanish maid
By the blue Guadalquiver!
Plaintive and sweet as “Dixie”‘s air
Of sadness which is not despair
And ravishes the enchanted ear
Of home-returning volunteer—
By his dear Bluegrass maiden sung,
To mandolin with silver tongue.
And witching is the fond adieu
The voice of beauty sings to you—
O, music-murmuring river!
For one, whose eyes and flowing locks
Are darker than the raven’s wing
Of midnight, brooding o’er yon rocks,
Touches the plaintive sounding string,
And pours a melancholy song
That floats the vocal stream along,
Sad as the convent’s vesper hymn,
Chanted by nuns, at twilight dim,
Or that strange harp, whose magic tone
So wildly sweet, so sad and lone,
To mortal minstrel never known,
On night winds wafts its hollow moan.
The ravished Genii of the waves
Repeat the story through the caves;
And far along the tuneful flood,
A never-ending multitude
Of echoing Ariels take their flight
Far down the dark aisles of the night.
If, when our throbbing hearts are still,
And pulseless lies the icy hand,
Reality should then fulfill
Our dreamings of a brighter land,
Then may the unfettered spirit’s ear,
In some supernal, sinless sphere,
Hear some immortal song like this
Float through the bowers of Paradise,
That bloom serene forever.
While wafted home to rest, we dream.
By Eden’s clear, ambrosial stream,
That clouds o’ershadow never.
We part! But O, who would not grieve
This world of melody to leave?
For round our hearts a witching spell
Lingers and whispers low, “Farewell!”
Like the low moan of ocean shell.
Or midnight chime of distant bell,
The torches, dancing to and fro,
Cast in long lines their golden glow
Over the inky surge’s flow,
Like arrows from Apollo’s bow
Or Dian’s starry quiver!
And like an anthem from the skies,
The voice of heavenly music dies
Far down the Echo River!
THE ANGEL OF THE HOSPITAL.
’Twas night in Richmond’s hospital. The day
As though its eyes were dimmed by bloody rain
From the red cloud of war, had quenched its light,
And in its stead some pale sepulchral lamps
Shed their dim rays across the halls of pain,
And flaunted mystic shadows on the walls.
Ah! woe is me! No ringing cry of “Charge!”
Stirs the hot, sulphurous air. The parting groan,
The shuddering moan of bitter agony
From white lips quivering as they strive in vain
To smother mortal pain, appall the ear,
And make the warm blood curdle in the heart.
Nor flag, nor plume, nor bayonet, nor lance,
Nor burnished gun, nor bugle-call, nor drum,
Display the pomp of battle; but instead,
The surgeon hard at work with lips compressed;
The tourniquet, the scalpel, and the lance,
The bandage and the splint are scattered round,
Dumb symbols telling more than tongue can speak
The awful presence of the fiend of war.
Lo, there! What gentle form with cautious step
Passes from cot to cot as noiselessly
As the faint shadows flickering on the wall?
She comes to one, a soldier from his youth,
Grown gray in arms, pierced through with mortal wounds;
Beside his cot she kneels and tells of Him
Who wrought redemption on the bitter cross.
The veteran hears with smile of gratitude,
And, like a frozen fount when it is touched
By the sun’s rays, he melts in gushing tears,
And, fixing his last look on her and Heaven,
Passes away in penitential prayer.
She comes to one in sinewy manhood’s prime,
Now prostrate like a lightning-shattered pine.
Death fears he not. His busy thoughts have gone
To his far cottage in the Southern wilds,
Where his young bride and prattling little ones,
Poor helpless lambs! chased by the wolves of war,
Wait for the absent one, and sadly say,
“How long he stays! Where can he be to-night?”
The angel softly whispers in his ear,
“A husband to the widow God will be,
And guard her orphans. Let His will be done.”
The dying man her consolation hears,
And gives the dearest treasure of his soul
In resignation to the will of Heaven.
A fair, pale boy of fifteen summers turns
His wasted form upon the couch of death;
Ah! how unlike the downy nest prepared
By mother’s love, when slept the tender child.
He heard the fife and drum and rushed to arms
Amid the rude companionship of war.
The raging fever burns his brain; he moans
And raves in agony; his laboring breath
Is quick and hot as that of stricken fawn
Stretched by the Indian’s arrow on the plain.
“Mother! dear mother!” oft his faltering tongue
Shrieks to the cold bare walls, which echo back
His wailing in the mockery of despair.
The angel comes, and fondly bending o’er
The boy she cools his throbbing brow and prays
That the Good Shepherd would take home the lamb,
Far wandering from the dear maternal fold,
To the green valleys of eternal rest.
(Nurse lifts her hands in horror, and faints away. Others hasten to her relief. The dead boy is carried out.)
Mary: O, my long-lost dear brother! What an awful moment was that when, by the dim lamp-light, I recognized in the wan, wasted face of the dying boy, the child with whom I had sported so often in the meadows and by the brook, gathering berries or wild flowers, and shouting in the fullness of mirth till the woods rang with the echoes. With me he grew up. We studied our tasks together till our aims and sympathies seemed to be one. The horrid war-bugle sounded; the dismal drum beat; the beardless boy then rushed from my arms to throw himself into the tumult of battle. Suddenly, while waiting on the wounded in the house of torture, I came upon the lost one, mangled and bleeding. He gasps and dies in my arms without recognition! Mother of Sorrows, whose loving heart was pierced with woe as with a sword under the cross of thy Son, give thy divine sympathy to this heart so bereaved, crushed, and desolate!
Materna:
An iron scepter and a brazen crown
The war-god bears; stern, cold, and merciless,
He smites his worshippers with bloody hand.
Foreman:
So walks the angel on from scene to scene:
Sweet vision of my dreams! thy light shall shine
Through this dark world, all cloudless, calm, serene.
Pure as the sacred evening star of love,
The brightest planet in the host above!
[Telegram from Andrew Johnson, Military Governor of Tennessee, to S. C. Mercer, Editor of the “Nashville Daily Union.”]
Washington, April 28, 1863.
To S. C. Mercer, Editor of the Nashville Daily Union:
Private. Your labors are highly appreciated out of Tennessee. Go on as you have done unfaltering in the work you have commenced. The Union Club of Nashville is doing much good. Their proceedings are looked to with much interest. I hope their policy will be sound and their purposes decided.
I have got things straightened out, I hope for the better. I will be in Nashville soon.
Andrew Johnson.
THE TWO SINGERS.
Two singers sat on New Year’s eve
By the blaze of a flickering fire.
“The old year is burning out,” said one
“Like the embers of our own life’s fire;
As the fire’s blaze are our passing days,
As the year shall our lives be o’er;
Let us sing a rhyme to the passing year
Ere we shall rhyme no more.”
The elder rhymer, heavy of heart,
Cried “Life is a thankless task.
Its loves and its hate, its Church and State,
Are only a hollow mask.
Honor, and love, and rank and fame,
Are chaff and idle words,
And the schemes of men and the hopes of youth
Are the chatter of silly birds.
“Thus runs my rhyme:—The Ferryman Time
With his ever-waning glass,
Has laid on his bier another year
And sung his Midnight Mass.
From the oak wood dim rose a funeral hymn
As earth bewailed the dead,
And the seas made moan through every zone
As the souls to Judgment fled.
“The Ferryman stands on the sable sands
Of the desolate Stygian stream;
Not a starry eye from the stormy sky
Shoots down one cheerful beam,
But a hopeless wail filled the winter gale
As the phantom guests rushed in,
And fear and despair, and doubt were there,
Hopes baffled, and woe and sin.
“Ambition told how his palace fell
Whose turrets braved the clouds,
His royal guests changed their courtly robes
For pale and ghostly shrouds.
His banquet hall is tenantless,
Unstrung is the minstrel’s viol—
Not a sound to greet but the pendulum’s beat
Of the lone monotonous dial.
“Genius proclaimed how folly’s scorn
Robbed his nights and days of rest,
And the only food of his eagle brood
Was the life-blood of his breast.
Bright were the gleams that lit his dreams,
But ah! when he awoke
His light was dead, his vision fled,
And hope and heart were broke.
“Pale as the light of an Eastern night
Straying through orange bowers,
Comes the love-crazed maid, Ophelia sad,
White-robed and crowned with flowers
The essence she of purity,
Born for love’s pure caress,
But madness quenched her soul’s desire
In utter wretchedness.
“So,” cried the bard, “the whole wide earth
Is a den of baffled souls.
’Mid all its pleasures, joys, and hopes,
The dreary death-bell tolls.”
“Hold,” cried his comrade—“See the whole
And judge not by a part.
The end shall crown the work, and heal
The disappointed heart.
See where the boatman waits to cross
Death’s strange, mysterious stream
The endless Life to Come outlasts
This mortal, transient dream.
“Unworthy of a wise man’s lips
Are the murmurs of despair;
The heavens have never lost one star
And God Himself reigns there,
A faithful God created man—
He ne’er forsakes a friend;
Wait, comrade, on God’s goodness still—
Be patient to the end.
“Through mists of doubt there shines a light
Upon Death’s farther shore—
Where the Lethean draught of peace is quaffed
And the struggle of earth is o’er.
Our feet shall stand on the shining strand
Of Life’s eternal river,
Where the buds of Hope in fullness ope
And Love endures forever.”
BATTLE OF MILL SPRING.
By the banks of the Cumberland echoes the roar
Of the sentinel’s warning—the foe’s on the shore.
Our war-drums are beaten, our bugles are blown,
And our legions advance to their musical tone.
By the banks of the Cumberland, slippery and red
With the death-dew of battle, and strewn with the dead,
Kentucky has routed her arrogant foe,
And victory’s star gilds the night of our woe.
By those banks, that once bloomed like an Eden of joy
The fiend of Disunion stalked forth to destroy,
Our rich teeming harvests he swept in his wrath,
And the blaze of our dwellings illumined his path.
Like an eagle-plumed arrow our Nemesis comes.
Shout, soldiers! sound, bugles! and clamor, oh drums!
Let the land ring aloud in the wildness of joy,
And the bonfires blaze brightly—but not destroy.
For the God of the Union has prospered the right,
And the ranks of Disunion have melted in flight.
Blow, bugles! roll, river! and tell to the sea
That our swords shall not rest ’till Kentucky is free.
THE GREEK SLAVE.
[Power’s Greek Slave was on exhibition in Lexington, Ky., where I lived when these lines were published in the Lexington Observer and Reporter.]
Soft as the silver songs which breathed
Over the Lesbian Sappho’s shell,
When the white-handed Paphians wreathed
Garlands for her who sang so well,
Is the low murmur of the waves
Which swell along Zacynthus’ caves
And in melodious echoes fall
Within the mermaids’ ocean hall.
There many a grove salutes the sea
With song-birds’ ceaseless harmony
Innumerable blossoms fling
Rich odors on the dewy wing
Of every breeze which wanders free
Over the blue Ægean Sea;
In golden splendor of the day
Reflected from the burnished bay,
Or spangled with the countless lights
Which gem those skies on cloudless nights,
And land and sea and sky above
Breathe only peace and joy and love.
A maiden in her grape-vine bower
Sat sorrowful at twilight’s hour,
And as her fingers sweep the strings
Of her guitar she softly sings,
“O, for the Greeks of olden time
Worthy our blest and sunny clime;
Men who would rather die than brook
That Turkish chain or Persian yoke
Should strangle like a serpent’s coil
One neck on freedom’s native soil.
Never, O never, ye Spartan dead,
Till you arise from your gory bed,
Will the Sultan cease to bear away
The flower of Greece for his harem’s prey.
The sun is up; his rising ray
Shoots brightly o’er the swelling bay,
And richly mottled shells which strew
The beach with many a dazzling hue.
With tapered masts in sunshine gleaming
And pennons in the breezes streaming
And snowy sails yon shallop glides
Gracefully over the heaving tides.
And see a captive maiden stands
Upon its deck with fettered hands.
Her song is changed to a wail of pain
For plundered home and parents slain.
Harsh is the clanging of the chains
Which bind her lithe and shapely limbs
Keen are their deep and cankering pains
But not for this her dark eye swims
In agonizing tears, whose flow
Betokens bitter shame and woe.
Sorer are tears for freedom fled
Than those affection gives the dead.
The sorest pangs that fate can send
Like arrows to the captive’s heart
Are not from outward griefs; these end,
Theirs is a transitory smart;
But musing on her island home,
The home of purity and bliss,
And then the thought of days to come—
The hopeless harem, it is this
Which fills her soul with deeper anguish
Than makes the dying martyr languish.
But Power’s hand shall carve the tale
Of sorrow in that Grecian vale.
His cunning chisel shall relate
The sorrow of a fallen State,
And the incomparable Slave,
Repeat o’er many a distant wave
The legend of the hapless maid
To Turkish lust and shame betrayed.
ODE TO IMPUDENCE
Goddess of Impudence,
Whose tinsel-crowned pretense
And shameless eye and cheek of polished brass
Rule Young America
With all-triumphant sway,
The forward school-boy and precocious lass,
Whose unweaned mouths smell of their nurses’ milk
And others of that ilk—
Inspire my pen,
Queen of the groundlings and the Upper Ten,
For to thy empire both belong
And both deserve a song.
What protean power
Is thy mysterious dower?
Thy wonder-working wand
Transmutes all things to gold like Midas’ hand—
All save the metal of thy followers’ face,
And that is brass, we know in every place;
Thy favors, where thou dost dispense,
Make up for lack of decency and sense;
Thy harlot tread
Crushes the modest violet in its bed;
Truth, wit, and merit are proclaimed a bore,
And kicked sans ceremonie from the door;
And power, wealth, and fame
Are given unto them who know no shame.
Thy trophies first are seen
In youths and maidens tender, young, and green,
Who stalk the streets about
Before their doting mothers know they’re out;
See how these infant swells
Gallant their baby belles,
Who know much more
Than their mammas found out at twenty-four;
They feel the early flame at seven;
At nine
They languish, sigh, and pine;
Till, dying to be wedded at thirteen,
A moonlight runaway concludes the scene.
The mincing maid,
Let loose from school,
Hooped, bustled, high-heeled, stayed,
Pert as a jay and stubborn as a mule,
Proves to the world that she has learned to faint
To dip, to lily-white, and paint,
And lift her skirts so high
That the unwilling eye
May see the neatness of her garter’s tie
Oh, Impudence; thou hast removed
The childish innocence we loved;
No more we see
The native blush of modesty;
Saucy and malapert,
The girl a coquette and the boy a flirt;
Forward and bold,
They honor not the old—
Not even the sire,
Who sits unhonored by his cheerless fire—
Too fondly dreaming of the sweet repose
Under the grape-vine shadows of Melrose.
Nor her who bore the brood,
The hissing vipers of ingratitude;
But dark and ominous fate
Sits like a raven o’er the gate
Whence modesty has fled,
And Impudence lifts up her brazen head,
For Folly’s breath pollutes the air,
And Wisdom will not linger there,
And all within
Bows to the iron rule of ignorance and sin.
See where the bold imposter plies his trade,
And cheats of every kind are made;
Quack creeds, quack medicines, quack politics,
In wild confusion mix;
And lo; the scribbler who writes down
The wisest and the noblest men,
With his envenomed pen,
To please the long-eared rabble of the town,
The darkly hinted calumny,
The vulgar jeer,
The cynic sneer,
The bold unblushing lie,
He scatters round in heedless wrath,
Like firebrands upon a madman’s path,
So when the infernal crew had hunted down
The statesman who deserved a crown,
And shot the empoisoned dart
Deep in his quivering heart,
While, like a stag chased home, at bay he stood,
Facing the clamorous pack athirst for blood;
With awful grandeur beaming in his eye,
Promethean in its agony,
The hireling scribbler all unshamed
By the sad gaze of him he had defamed,
Exulted in his hellish work,
As the assassin when he plies his dirk,
And styled himself apostle sent to teach
Mankind the glories of free thought and speech.
The Sage upon Judea’s Mount
Unsealed the everlasting fount
Of Peace and Truth and Love,
And the Evangel Dove
Came from the skies and nestled to his breast,
And bright-eyed Hope,
From Heaven’s starry slope,
Under his gentle reign,
Beheld the Golden Age return again,
And Earth was blest.
But lo; lean wolves have seized the fold,
And brass supplants the Age of Gold.
Luxurious, profligate, and vile,
With lips of guile,
And Judas’ kiss and smile,
The modern Pharisee,
With broad phylactery,
Converts the temple of his God
Into a mart of crime and fraud.
Inspired by thee, oh, Impudence;
He holds the words of truth and speaks a lie,
Cloaks blackest sins with fair pretense
Of Apostolic piety,
And shears the starving sheep and flays the lambs,
’Mid groans and prayers and penitential psalms.
Oh, Impudence; thy triumph is complete;
Mankind lie prostrate at thy feet,
And every class,
Like bees in swarm,
Are spell-bound by the charm
Of “tinkling cymbals and of sounding brass,”
Genius and modest worth
Starve in the cradle of their birth.
They win the meed of fame
Whose deeds deserve the pillory of shame;
Upon the topmost waves of honor ride,
As scum and froth float on the swollen tide.
So coxcombs in the garden blow,
While fragrant myrtles nestle low;
So hollyhocks uplift their head
In scentless robes of flaunting red,
And gaudy peonies
Attract the passers’ eyes,
Yet from their leaves no fragrant dews
Their cheering influence diffuse
Like that ambrosia and sweet violets shed,
Or fragrant mignonette in its unnoticed bed.
MY BIRTHDAY.
Another milestone meets me, on Time’s weary road of woe,
And onward to the sea of Death, o’er rugged steeps I go;
Far in the West the setting sun in clouds is sinking fast,
And night o’ertakes me with its storms and madly howling blast.
Ah, there were days whose lapse was like the flow of summer waves
When June’s fresh roses stoop to kiss the murmuring stream that laves,
When gentle tones and loving eyes my boyish pastimes blest
And childhood’s every care was soothed upon a mother’s breast.
Sister, sweet sister, oh, could not the fearful spoiler spare
A heart so true and innocent, a form so young and fair!
I saw thy lily hands crossed on thy snowy winding sheet,
But thy soul was by the shining throne, upon the golden street.
But oh, thy gentle voice on earth can make no music now,
And in the tomb the funeral dust is gathered on thy brow.
What now is left to me? To muse upon the past with pain
While the quivering pulse is throbbing like a death knell on my brain.
I am like one shipwrecked upon some bleak and lonely shore,
With not a voice to greet his ear except the billows’ roar;
All that he loved are whelmed far down beneath the briny sea;
Even hope deserts him now—alas! all hope has fled from me!
Dark falls the night—all pitiless the rainy tempests blow—
Earth yields no shelter, and above no friendly beacons glow;
A crown of thorns is piercing through my aching, throbbing brow,
And iron griefs my pallid cheeks with deep run furrows plow.
But oh, thou Holy One, whose feet once pressed this earthly sod;
Balm of the bruised and bleeding heart, oh, sinless Lamb of God,
To thee on bended knees, with tears of bitterness, I pray,
For thou canst heal my stricken heart and guide me on the way.
BATTLE OF NASHVILLE
December 15-16, 1864.
[Written as a Carriers’ Address for the Nashville Daily Press and Times, December 25, 1864.]
The Preparation.
All day, while gazing from yon lofty tower,
We saw, far gleaming through the mist and smoke,
The camps, like fleets upon a circling sea,
Or snowdrifts sleeping on the frozen hills,
Dumb batteries, like bloodhounds in the leash,
Yet terrible in silence, the blue tide
Of cavalry, the battle’s foremost wave;
The gunboats on the left; upon the right
Fort Gillem’s bannered staff, and to the south
Fort Negley’s bastions belting St. Cloud’s hill,
And Morton and Casino by its side.
How soon their guns will belch their sulphurous breath
Upon the crimson carnival of Death!
The Night Scene.
But when the darkness swallowed up the day,
As if we entered the Elysian fields,
Through the encircling clouds of awful night,
We saw a glowing Paradise of light.
A thousand camp-fires blossomed on the hills,
The flame-leaved lilies of the Field of Mars,
Minerva’s bloody roses, passion-flowers,
Planted by sooty Vulcan, whose red disc
Thrive best in crimson showers, and gather strength,
Fanned by the moans and sighs of dying men,
Each tented hill and pyramid of fire
Flashed round the dark horizon, till it seemed
A billowed sea of many-twinkling lights,
Or burning girdle of Vesuvian crests
Whose surging lava trembled to o’erleap
Their glowing craters and engulf the plains.
Alas, for many a harnessed warrior when
Yon Battle-Titan turns him in his den!
The Prelude.
Hearken! In the murky morning,
Sounds the awful note of warning.
Winding down the river shore
Tramps the veteran Sixteenth Corps,
Wilson’s bugles charm the river,
With the signal of advance,
Twenty thousand guidons quiver
From the horsemen’s tapering lance!
Twenty thousand chargers’ feet
Hurry through the startled street,
Stretching “to the crack of doom”
Till they vanish in the gloom
Of the woods which fringe the west
Round Fort Zollicoffer’s crest.
We hear along the western shore
The sullen battle’s opening roar,
While in the clouds, like the Angel of Death,
The white-winged shells pour their sulphurous breath.
Hatch’s horsemen spur their steeds,
Croxton’s sabres bright and gleaming,
Johnson in the vanguard leads
Still encircling, still advancing,
Onward like a torrent’s dashing,
Spaulding’s carbine fire is flashing,
Like a serpent line of fire—
Stewart reels before their ire.
Rolls the battle-tumult higher—
The soldier falls—the charger bleeds,
Stewart’s line recoils!—recedes!
“Charge the batteries!”—It is done—
Stewart’s legions turn and fly—
Swells the glad shout of Victory!—
So the first day’s strife is won
The Second Day.
The morning breaks
With battle thunder,
The city wakes
With fear and wonder.
See the glittering bayonets shine,
Along the front of Steedman’s line.
The bugle’s call—the rolling drum—
The mad shriek of the flying shell,
The rush—the soldier’s frenzied yell,
The crash of the exploding bomb
Careering wildly through the air,
The distant batteries’ vivid glare,
The cannons’ smoke which jets aloof,
The foaming charger’s clattering hoof,
The musketry’s incessant shower,
Drifting its lead ’round Acklin’s tower;
The cannister’s consuming spray,
Where dauntless Steedman cleaves his way;
Or fearless Wood’s heroic form
Lion-like, confronts the storm,
Startle the eye and stun the ear
As sweeps the battle’s wild career
There is dread and desperation,
There is wrath and trepidation;
They grapple, they reel
In the sharp shock of steel,
They struggle, they bleed,
They rush, they recede;
Death’s harvesters labor
With carbine and sabre.
In swaths the dead are falling, and the maimed and bleeding writhe
Before the steady swinging of the ponderous battle-scythe.
The Chief.
Serene and steady as the Polar Star
Whose light no clouds can quench nor billows mar
But shines while tempests lash the deep below,
Thomas surveyed the turbid storm of war,
And gazed and watched to strike the final blow,
The Rock of Chickamauga, braving the whirlwind’s jar.
The Charge.
Freemen of the stern Northwest,
Come with bayonets in rest,
Exiles of East Tennessee
Strike! and make the oppressor flee.
Warriors once in fetters bound,
With liberty would you be crowned?
Now or never stand your ground,
Make your fearless masters feel
The vengeance of a freeman’s steel,
And with or on your shining shield
Return in glory from the field.
Clenched lips turn pale, but they pale not with fear,
And the soldier’s eye gleams like a star in its sphere,—
There’s a hush!
There’s a rumbling and crush,
Like the breaking of the ice in a thawing river’s flush,
The solid earth shakes with a universal rush,
The clouds of battle break,
The hills in terror quake,
While the fire crackles down their sides like a red volcanic lake—
Beneath whose fiery surge that day full many a bark went down,
And many a soul which morning woke from dreams of high renown.
Face to face and sword to sword—
See the slave confront his lord;
Through the tumult the foam-covered charger is spurred,
And the shrieks of the wounded and dying are heard;
And the muskets and carbines are doubled and battered
And sabres and bayonets to atoms are scattered—
The command and the curse, and the groan and the yell,
Thunder up like the mad-bubbling cauldron of Hell.[B]
Eagles of victory, say, on which flag will you alight—
Confederate or Federal? Both deem their cause is right;
Never more fearless rivals grappled in mortal fight.
No carpet knights are they, but iron-sinewed men,
From office, mine, and workshop, from mountain, prairie, glen,
From legendary Southern river, from sparkling Northern lake,
From Indiana beechwood, or Arkansas cane-brake.
All worthy of the highest song that dropped from Homer’s pen.
Leonidas at Thermopylæ led on no braver crew
Than those who bore the “Stars and Bars”; nor bloody Waterloo,
Than the men who carried the “Stars and Stripes” where bullets thickest flew.
God speed the day when the boys in Gray shall charge with the boys in Blue,
And San Juan and Manila Bay a loving-cup shall brew,
And Dewey and Joe Wheeler the old love shall renew.
Where is Thomas? His lips compressed,
Smother the tumult in his breast;
Along the line his clear survey
Scans the sure fortune of the day.
“Forward to the charge once more!”
Then like the Judgment thunder,
Cleaving the clouds asunder,
The shock of battle sweeps from shore to shore
And shakes the rock-ribbed valley with its roar.
Like a tropical tornado, Death pours his crimson rain
In swirling drifts of slaughter along the trampled plain.
Bleeding and torn and shattered, Hood’s vanquished legions fly,
And along the Union line goes up the shout of victory.
Thus Nashville’s Two Days’ Battle by our silent chief was won,
And our hearts were filled with gladness at the setting of the sun.
BLONDE AND BRUNETTE.
Two clouds, gold and purple, at sunrise contending;
Two chords of rare music, contrasting and blending,
Through the carnival flying like sunshine and shadow,
Pursuing each other o’er mountain and meadow,
Swept our blonde and brunette, all radiant with joy—
Cleopatra of Egypt, and Helen of Troy.
The blonde is a dew-spangled morning in June
When birds, breeze and bees with the sun are in tune;
Her lips and the rose scent the crystalline air
And the sunshine is lost in the gold of her hair.
The brunette is a ray of the mystical light
Which falls from the moon on a midsummer night,
And visions celestial of Loveland arise,
From the luminous depths of her violet eyes;
And each rapturous gleam of her presence gives birth
To the joys which fair Venus brought down to the earth.
GRAY AND BLUE.
Dedicated to Col. R. W. Brown, of the Louisville Times.
The rage and the chaos of battle,
The carnage and anguish are o’er,
The wrath and the rout of Manassas,
The death-knell of Gettysburg’s roar;
And softly, round Nashville and Richmond,
Descends, like Christ’s mercy, the dew
Where sleep, till the angel of Judgment
Shall wake them, the Gray and the Blue.
From the gray of the balm-breathing morning
The mists of the night flee away
Till the sun, in his orient splendor,
Paints the vault with the clear blue of day;
As those colors in Heaven commingle,
O, hearts that are faithful and true!
Blend now in affection together
By your love of the Gray and the Blue.
Earth wondered when fought the gray legions
Round Johnston and Cleburne and Lee,
When the Blue followed Grant, Meade, and Thomas
And Sherman marched down to the sea;
And Stuart’s and Sheridan’s horsemen
In scorn smote the war-dragon’s mouth,
A stone wall of granite the Northland,
A stone wall of marble the South.
Strew roses, the sweetest of Summer,
For brave and magnanimous Lee,
For Lincoln, the merciful victor,
For the slain on the land and the sea,
And the States in communion forever
Like eagles their strength shall renew,
And the Star of our Union shine brighter
In the concord of Gray and of Blue.
Not vainly you perished, O brothers!
For the land of your deathless devotion,
The torch-bearing maid of Bartholdi
Is kindling with splendor the ocean.
One flag over Northland and Southland,
Shall rally the faithful and true,
While ocean rolls gray in the morning,
Or mirrors the stars in its blue.
BISHOP DUDLEY’S DIRGE.
Hang old Christ Church with purple,
The colors of a king,
In honor of the kingly soul
Which hence has taken wing;
In consolation’s labor
He fell—his Lord’s behest—
So evening skies are purple-clad
When goes the sun to rest.
Paul’s Bishop—“Blameless, Vigilant,
Wise, Patient, apt to Teach,”
Careless of fame or lucre,
All men he longed to reach;
“Of Good Report ’mongst those Without,”
Pure, Genial, Loyal, True,
Thus, “Brother Man,” God’s Bishop
Toiled, preached, and sowed for you.
Thus through the land toiled, preached, and sowed
The manliest of men
The seeds of truth, and from his dust
Shall spring his like again;
New Dudleys—’tis the Master’s pledge—
Shall at his voice arise,
For his immortal spirit speaks
To earth from Paradise,
And the purple robes of other kings—
Such force a good example brings—
Shall glorify the skies.
THE DRESS CIRCLE.
[A ball-room mishap of crinoline days, founded on fact.]
“When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”—Hamlet.
“Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime”?
Where the girls live on partridges, oysters and turtle,
And their days fly as swift as a musical rhyme?
If you don’t it’s a pity—I think you had better
Now listen, my story is true to the letter.
O Lulu! dear Lulu! most beautiful one,
Whose dark locks sweep over thy exquisite face,
As the wings of the tempest o’ershadow the sun,
Fair fawn of the forest, thy bright dwelling place,
Where the partridges, oysters and turtle were swallowed,
With catsups and pickles, and fixin’s more solid,
Was graced by no damsel so charming as thou
Or so hapless, the night I am writing of now.
Dear Lulu, sweet angel, was just coming out,
As they say, had just let the tucks out of her dresses,
Had such a sly ogle, and the prettiest pout,
And a coiffeur de Paris did up her tresses,
So her Ma, Mrs. Browne, to give her a start, she
Determined, one summer, to give her a party,
The rout of the season, where her darling Lulu
Might capture the town by her brilliant debut.
(They rig up blood-horses with ribbons, you know,
To make them sell quicker, when brought to the show.)
So she sent a darky round the town, with cards to the elite,
With “Mrs. Browne’s regards and she’ll be at home to-night.”
The clock struck ten, the carriages drew up before the gate,
The ton display their quality by coming rather late.
A crowd it was, you may be sure, of opulence and fashion,
For Mrs. Browne had for high life what one would call a passion.
There were satins, muslin, taffetas and laces, and illusion
Like all the rainbows since the flood crushed in one grand confusion,
And as her guests the parlor thronged, delighted Mrs. Browne
Felt just a notch or two above all rival Mas in town.
O feminine, O masculine embarrassment of riches!
For those who wore and those who longed for bifurcated breeches!
There was flouncing Miss Barege, and grass-widow, Madame Clack,
Miss Creame-Cocaine, the dreamer, whey-faced, of morals slack,
Miss Polly Prude, the finical, fastidious and precise,
Miss Reverie, a tall bas bleu with sentimental eyes,
Miss Twitchell, always twitching, Miss Giggle with her twitter,
Miss Dumb-Bell of the wallflower set, a most accomplished sitter,
All planets of the Milky Way; as for the herd of beaux,
Know one, know all—mustachios, gloves, smirks, bows and faultless clothes.
But for laughing and screaming and ogling and dancing,
Coquetting and ogling and sighing and glancing,
Madame Mazourka that night made her mark,
As a punk that took fire at the flash of each spark,
So high in her waltzing, so low in her dress, that
She really left gazers very little to guess at.
For each time that she bounded or gracefully fell—
For where her grace bounded, sin much more abounded—
Each curve was so plumply and gracefully rounded—
The dullest of eyes could discern the fine swell
Of her dress, and much more than is proper to tell.
I’ve a hearty contempt—I hope nobody’s hurt
For that pitiful nuisance, a married flirt,
Whether it wears a chemise or shirt,
For when the green season of myrtles is o’er
This wrinkled-faced courtship is rather a bore,
And the musk and the paint on an old married lover
Don’t smell quite as sweetly as newly mown clover.
O you who are wedded, take care how you walk!
For the world is suspicious and people will talk,
And spectators may say—no accounting for taste—
No arm but a husband’s should encircle the waist
Of a lady that’s married, in the waltz’s mad whirls,
And no finger but his should disport with her curls;
But back to my story—the sin of digression
It’s really becoming my crying transgression,
But your feelings will hurry you sometimes away,
And genius, kind reader, you know must have play.
You pardon? Well, then, to take up the thread
Of my story—the old folks were snoring in bed;
In the western horizon the moon kept her course,
The talkers were drowsy, the singers were hoarse,
When Lulu was strolling the cool walks among
While her beau held her ear as she didn’t her tongue.
Sweet Venus and Cupid o’er the wide earth held reign
And the pennons streamed gay o’er their Castles in Spain.
O Lulu, dear Lulu! magnificent belle—
Whose name is a charm and whose presence a spell,
Bright star ever shining in Memory’s stream,
You were gowned on that night in the very extreme
Of fashion, indeed quite a crinoline belle,
You spread yourself so, and you made such a swell,
Your dress circle being made after the pattern
Of the rings that the telescope shows around Saturn,
Not whalebone or cordage, but Carnegie’s best steel,
As when you dance with her next time you can feel.
Now, I do not blame Lulu for her fondness for dress
It’s a passion some people find hard to repress,
And take this excuse, dear reader, I beg;
Her grandma had left her a very fine leg-
Acy, so having abundance of means,
And being quite young—indeed still in her teens—
She dressed herself up in the climax of style,
“A miss”—in circumference—“as good as a mile.”
Well, Lulu was chatting away with her beau
Of dances and courtships, and quarrels and so,
When all of a sudden she made a full stop
In her gay tête-a-tête, and screamed at the top
Of her voice, till each sleepy-eyed maid in the hall
Sprang quick to her feet at the terrible squall,
There pale as the Greek Slave of Powers she stood,
Her white lips unstained by a vestige of blood,
Her arms, like a Pythoness, in agony tossed,
As she shrieked in her anguish, “O Lord, I am lost!”
While footsteps fell round her as quick as the clatter
Of a cavalcade’s hoofs, each one bawling at her
“O Lulu, my darling, pray what is the matter?”
“A serpent is biting me under my dress!”
“Lord help us!” burst forth in a wail of distress,
“It’s coiling around my—It’s big as a rail,
And a great bunch of rattles tied on to its tail,”
Ne’er toper saw snake from his jag or his jug
Like this which clasped Lulu in terrible hug.
There were sobbings and swooning away on the floor,
Of disordered lingerie over a score,
“Unions,” “Merodes,” and garters galore,
Indeed ’twas a contretemps all might deplore!
“A snake at a dance!” “How dare poke its face
Into such an exceedingly improper place?”
So the old snake in Paradise brought us to grief;
He skulked behind Eve; Eve behind her fig leaf,
And this great world, which it took a whole week to make,
Went into bankruptcy, all for one snake.
O Fashion, what follies your votaries make,
What frauds to your bosom with rapture you take,
’Twixt the gay masquerade and the sorrowful wake,
One tenth is for fashion and nine tenths for mere fake,
And maidens adorn their fair forms with a snake;
For earrings, for bracelets, for necklace and jewel,
Diamonds and rubies for eyes cold and cruel.
Sparkling and dazzling at reception and mass,
On debutante’s fingers or on widow of grass,
O! feminine dragon!—how else depict her,
When the girl of my dreams turns boa-constrictor?
Why pineth fair woman’s heart for a snake?
Man would perish a million times o’er for her sake.
At last one golden youth, more bold than the rest,
Walked up, bowed and spoke as he pulled down his vest
“Well! crying won’t help it, so pray now be still,
They say there’s a way whene’er there’s a will,
I will tie up his tail in a sort of a link,
And jerk him from under his quarters, I think,”
Dread silence fell like a spell on the air,
Sobs hardly suppressed, inarticulate prayer,
When cautiously groping lest he might mistake,
And grab a—suspender instead of the snake,
He at last found the dragon and fastened his hold,
It was scaly and squirming, and quivering and cold,
Like a huge anaconda writhing its fold,
And then with a clutch that was steady and bold,
He twisted it up in a sort of a loop,
And jerked out—at least forty feet of steel hoop!
IN MEMORIAM.
[Lieutenant Boyd Mercer, Eleventh Kentucky Infantry, U. S. A., 1861.]
Some souls, unmoved by lust of fame or pelf,
Pass their whole lives without a thought of self;
No selfish schemes their high ideals smother—
Such was thy soul, my noble-hearted brother.
Modest in manner as a gentle maid,
As lion bold was duty’s call obeyed,
Nor man nor devil made thy soul afraid,
To home, to God and Country ever true.
Like skylark springing from the morning dew,
Thine upward, sunlit flight thou didst pursue.
The ocean’s costliest pearls lie ’neath its waves,
Blaze richest gems in undiscovered caves,
And like the wealth o’er which the ocean rolls
God knows the value of his purest souls.
Citizen and Christian soldier—why lament
A life so truly planned, so nobly spent?
Now without taint or mixture of alloy
Christ’s soldier marches in eternal joy.
THE SORROWS OF HINDA AND KLEINFELTER.
“The course of true love never did run smooth.”—Shakespeare.