Motes of the dust as it streams, yet touched with the light of God’s purpose!
VII
So they lay in the line, as the discord diminished, and almost
Seemed as a silence, to sense that was drowned with the sound of the cannon.
Hung on the spirits of all men a prescience of something impending
Great and strange, as at times when thick darkness possesses the noonday;
Yet was the sky most bright with its burning azure; and strangely
Shifted the wind, and lifted the lingering smoke as a curtain;
Reek of the powder drew off, and the valley was bare and apparent,
Dip of the hollowing plain, and the trampled green of the cornfields.