And their manhood’s strength and glory
On their country’s altar laid.
“They have bought their country’s freedom,
Sealed with blood and bitter pain;
They have fought, and they have suffered,
But their work was not in vain:
Over all our rescued country
Floats the starry flag again.”
But, as the rainbow of peace now spans the political horizon, may we not soon hope for the fulfilment of the prophetic words of the immortal Lincoln, in the closing paragraph of his first inaugural address? “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over our broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
