Voice after voice caught up the song,
Until its tender passion
Rose like an anthem, rich and strong—
Their battle-eve confession.
Dear girl, her name he dared not speak,
But as the song grew louder,
Something upon the soldier’s cheek
Washed off the stains of powder.
Beyond the darkening ocean burned
The bloody sunset’s embers,
While the Crimean valleys learn’d
How English love remembers.
And once again a fire of hell
Rain’d on the Russian quarters,
With scream of shot and burst of shell,
And bellowing of the mortars!
An Irish Nora’s eyes are dim
For a singer dumb and gory;
An English Mary mourns for him
Who sang of “Annie Laurie.”
Sleep, soldiers! still in honor’d rest
Your truth and valor wearing;
The bravest are the tenderest—
The loving are the daring.
UPHILL.
BY CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.
Christina Rossetti was born at London in 1828. She came of that versatile family, in which the father and sons as well as the daughter were writers, artists, critics and poets. While still in her teens, Miss Rossetti published a little volume called “Maud, Prose and Verse,” and crude and morbid as the work was it gave promise of better things. She wrote later, “Goblin Market” (which Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustrated), “A Pageant and Other Poems,” and several religious studies. She died in 1894.
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.