Their silent tents are spread;
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.
Theodore O’Hara.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How naught from death could save,
’Til every sound appears a knell
And every spot a grave.
Abraham Lincoln.
“I never made a secret of the fact that of all the glorious regiments that marched to the music of the Union and cooled their heated brows in the shadows of the Stars and Stripes, the Twenty-first Massachusetts was peculiarly my own—nearest in my thoughts, and deepest in my love, and there are many who know that more than once my heart went down in agony under the blood-stained soil with the lifeless forms of its bravest and its best. I would divide the last half of the last loaf with any soldier in that regiment, though I had never met him.”—Clara Barton.