The Re-entombment of Napoleon.
Of all the great and remarkable men of modern times, Napoleon Bonaparte was the most wonderful. He was a son of a lawyer of Corsica, an island in the Mediterranean sea, belonging to France. From a humble station he rose to be the emperor of France, and the greatest general of modern times. He hurled kings from their thrones, and put others in their places. He dismembered empires, and created new ones. He made the whole earth ring with his mighty deeds. But one thing he could not do—he could not conquer himself. His ambition led him on from one step of injustice to another, till the embattled armies of Europe appeared in the field against him. He was defeated, dethroned, and taken on board a British ship to the rocky and lonely island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821.
After being entombed for almost twenty years, the king, Louis Philippe, sent out a ship to bring back his body to France, to be re-entombed in the capital of the empire of which he once swayed the sceptre. The hearts of many of the French people adore the name of Napoleon; and the ceremony of his re-entombment, which has just taken place at Paris, is the theme of the fallowing lines.
Sound the trumpet, roll the drum!
Come in long procession, come!
Come with sword and come with lance,
Children of heroic France;
Come from castle’s frowning wall,
Come from the ancestral hall,
Come, poor peasant, from thy shed,
Cowled monk and crowned head!
From the hamlet’s green retreat,
From the city’s crowded street,
From the proud Tuilleries’ door
Let the royal escort pour;
Duke and baron, king and queen,
Gather to the august scene;
In your purple pomp arrayed,
Haste to swell the grand parade.
Brow of snow and locks of gold,
Matron, maiden, young and old!
Sound the trumpets, roll the drum,
For Napoleon’s ashes come!
Sound the trumpet, roll the drum!
Let the cannon be not dumb;
Charge your black guns to the brim,
Invalides! to welcome him!
War-worn veterans, onward march
To Etoiles’ towering arch.
Let the column of Vendome,
Let the Pantheon’s soaring dome,
Champs de Mars and Elysees,
Hear the clang of arms to-day;
Let the Luxembourg once more
Hear Napoleon’s cannon roar.
Bring the eagles forth that flew
O’er the field of Waterloo,
Bring his tattered banners, red
With the blood at Jena shed,
Scorched with fire and torn with steel,
Rent by battle’s crushing heel,
When the fight o’er Moscow pealed,
And Marengo’s sanguine field;
Sound the clarion’s wildest strain,
For the conqueror comes again!
Sound a sad funereal wail
For the warrior stark and pale!
Hussar and dark cuirassier,
Lancer and fierce grenadier;
Soldiers of the Seine and Rhone,
Join the universal moan.
Conscripts who have never yet
In the front of battle met,
Join your sorrows to the grief
Of these veterans for their chief!
Veterans, raise your brows the while,
As of yore by Rhine and Nile;
Show the frequent ghastly scar
Won in following him to war;
Tell the fields where you have bled,
Left a limb, or heart’s-blood shed;
And remembering each brave year,
March on proudly by his bier——
Forth with drooping weapons come
To the rolling of the drum!
Let the city’s busy hum
Cease when rolls the muffled drum;
Let no light laugh, no rude sound,
E’er disturb the hush profound!
Only let the swinging bell
Of St. Roche peal out its knell.
Silence! on his rolling car
Comes the favored Child of war!
Not as in the olden days,
With his forehead bound with bays,
With the bright sword in his hand,
Encircled with his ancient band.
Long the sceptre and the crown
At the grave hath he laid down.
Now with coffin and with shroud
Comes the chieftain once so proud.
On his pale brow, on his cheek,
Death hath set his signet bleak,
And the dead alone doth crave
Rest and silence in the grave.
Sound the trumpet, roll the drum,
Bear his ashes to the tomb!