The rising moon, against which, like despair,
High on the hill, a woman, darkly drawn,
The wild leaves round her, stood; with features wan,
And tattered dress and wind-distracted hair.
As still as death, and looking, not through tears,
For the young face of one she knows is lost,
While in her heart the melancholy frost
Gathers of all the unforgotten years.
What if she heard to-night a hurrying hoof,
Wild as the whirling of the withered leaf,
Bring her a more immedicable grief,
A shattered shape to live beneath her roof!
The shadow of him who claimed her once as wife;
Her lover!—no!—the wreck of all their past
Brought back from battle!—Better to the last
A broken heart than heartbreak all her life!
MOSBY AT HAMILTON
Down Loudon lanes, with swinging reins,
And clash of spur and sabre,
And bugling of the battle-horn,
Six score and eight we rode that morn,
Six score and eight of Southern born,
All tried in war’s hot labor.
Full in the sun, at Hamilton,
We met the South’s invaders;
Who, over fifteen hundred strong,
’Mid blazing homes had marched along
All night, with Northern shout and song,
To crush the rebel raiders.
Down Loudon lanes, with streaming manes,
We spurred in wild March weather;
And all along our war-scarred way
The graves of Southern heroes lay—
Our guide-posts to revenge that day,
As we rode grim together.
Old tales still tell some miracle
Of Saints in holy writing—
But who shall say why hundreds fled
Before the few that Mosby led,
Unless it was that even the dead
Fought with us then when fighting.