Over the rippling harbor came
The growling, bull-dog bark of culverins,
Red rockets curved and plunged
Across the dawn.
The world seemed drunk with confidence
That day—
Some secret nervousness about the slaves;
What they might think or say;
But they did neither;
The bugles shouted at the Citadel.
Hours were punctuated by glad bells,
Soon to be hid away,
And gales of laughter came from gardens,
Where bright tear-dashed eyes must weep farewells
The braver lips refused to falter—
Mouths then seemed only made to kiss
For men in gray,
Who left the ancient houses of proud names,
Through magic gates upon that magic day
When the lost cause was still-born in its hope.
II
And I had gone—
It seemed no man's work then—
To buy supplies from "good friends" at the North—
Two years at old St. Louis and then down the river,
Past winking lights of towns and federal rams,
In flat-boats with a precious freight of barrels,
Marked for the Yankees; but one night
We supped past their last fort
And floated down to Vicksburg through the dark.
How dull the lanterns glimmered at the quay!
But there was welcome, too,
Proud, thankful hands,
To take the medicine and powder,
And unload sorghum barrels
That we might change to quinine and to gold,
If we could ever get them to Nassau.
The column which they printed in the "News"
On wall-paper, first made me think
That it was worth-while man's work after all.
Then, out across the miles of leaguered states,
Through pine-barrens where frowsy men in gray
Lay with their wounded in the haggard camps—
A glimpse of old times in Atlanta
Like a last febrile glow in well-loved eyes.
Now rolling in flat cars, trundling to the sea,
Back of the bull-head, wood-devouring engines.
At last by night to Charleston
Just before the iron ring closed—
Ours was the last freight train of the war,
Before the anaconda squeezed;
But I had won (perhaps) if we could get
Those precious barrels to England or Nassau.
How changed my city was—
The grass grew in her streets,
And there were blackened ruins raw with fire;
A few old darkies crept along her ways;
The busy thunder of the drays was gone;
And ruin spoke with statue lips.
Only a glimmering candle lurked in landward windows,
Dim through shimmering shutter chinks—
Silence—silence was over all—no bells—
St. Michael's were in hiding,
And St. Philip's spoke another voice,
And rung a blatant dirge to bluecoats, far
[11]In old Virginia, with Lee's batteries.
The miles of cotton rotted on the wharfs,
And the Swamp Angel belled with distant shocks
Like earthquake jars;
There was heat-lightning in the sky
That God had never made,
From our sea-island batteries;
And once a shell fell somewhere in the town
With a despairing scream that hope was dead.
Such were the streets—
And it was starving time in houses
Where fat generosity once ran amuck,
No fires in inns, no cheerful bark of hounds,
Or stroke of social hoofs upon the stones.
And the long docks bit the black water
Like old loosened fangs that held the sea
In one last grinning jaw-clamp of despair.
I knew those docks
When at the hour of noon
A molten clangor shivered cheerful air
And thousand ship-bells rang—
And now—only a drifting buoy-bell rung
The knell of hope with its emphatic tongue,
Cut loose by the blockaders
To wander down the harbor in despair.