OUR VOLUNTEERS.
Where shall we write your names, ye brave!
Where build for you a monument,
Who lie in many a sylvan grave,
Stretched half across the continent!
Young, bright and brave, the very flower
And choice of all we had to give,
With you what glory ceased to live,—
Or lives again in hearts of men.
An inspiration and a power!
For when one sunny day in June,
A sudden war-cry shook the land,
As if from out clear skies at noon
Had dropped the lightning's deadly brand—
Ah then, while rang our British cheers,
And pealed the bugle, rolled the drum,
We saw the Nation rise like one!
Swift formed the files,—a thousand miles
Of them, our gallant Volunteers!
Deep clanged the bells, the drums did beat,
And still from east and west they came;
Echoed the street with martial feet,
From north, from south, with hearts aflame:
Ah, still the tires of freedom burn,—
Be witness, Ridgway's silent shade,
No foe shall dare our land invade,
While hearts like those that met the foes,
Still beat like theirs,—the undismayed,
The brave, who never will return.
Our Country holds them in her heart,
Shrined with her mountains and her rivers;
And still for them her proud lip quivers,
And tears to her great eyelids start:
But they are tears of love and pride,
And she shall tell to coming years
The story of her Volunteers,
For all their names are hers and fame's—
The brave who live, the brave who died.
NIGHT,—A PHANTASY
Night! the horrible wizard Night!
The dumb and terrible Night
Hath drawn his circle of magic, round
Over the sky, and over the ground,
Without a sound.
Ah me, what woeful phantoms rise,
With ice-cold hands and pitiless eyes,
As stars grow out of the summer skies,
Tangible things to mortal sight,
Under the hands of the wizard Night!
Night! the mystical prophet, Night!
The haunted and awful Night!
With the trail of his garment's shadowy fall,
Soundless and black as a funeral pall,
Now enters his dread laboratory.
A wan, and faint, and wavering glory
Shines from a veiled lamp somewhere hidden.
Like a lily in a grave:
And things unholy, and things forbidden,—
Hands that have long been the earth-worm's prey,
And shrouded faces out of the clay.
Rise and fill the enchanted cave
With a pale and deathly light,—
The haunted and awful Night!
Night! the abhorred magician Night!
The black astrologer Night!
Night is the world!—I shiver with fright:—
The air is full of evil things,
The coil and glitter of snaky rings,
And, the tremor of vast invisible wings,
That are not heard but felt:
They touch my hair, my hand, my cheek,
They mope and mouth, but they never speak
To utter their awful history.
Oh, when will the darkness break and melt,
Like blocks of ice on a golden reef,
And little by little, as leaf by leaf,
In light and color and form increased,
The rose of morning blooms in the east,—
The old yet ever new mystery!
And I fall on my knees to worship the light
That casts out the evil demon of Night,
And hallows with blossoms, like prayers, the way
Of another new day.