"Oh, Beverly!—brother! It never would do!
Who comforts mamma, and who helps her like you?
She sends to the battle her darlingest one,—
She could not give both of them,—husband and son;
If she lose you, what's left her in life to enjoy?
—Oh, no! I am glad you are only a boy."
And Sophy looks up with her tenderest air,
And kisses the fingers that toy with her hair.
For her, who all silent and motionless stands,
And over her heart locks her quivering hands,
With white lips apart, and with eyes that dilate,
As if the low thunder were sounding her fate,—
What racking suspenses, what agonies stir,
What spectres these echoes are rousing for her!
Brave-natur'd, yet quaking,—high-souled, yet so pale,—
Is it thus that the wife of a soldier should quail,
And shudder and shrink at the boom of a gun,
As only a faint-hearted girl should have done?
Ah! wait until custom has blunted the keen,
Cutting edge of that sound, and no woman, I ween,
Will hear it with pulses more equal, more free
From feminine terrors and weakness, than she.
The sun sinks serenely; a lingering look
He flings at the mists that steal over the brook,
Like nuns that come forth in the twilight to pray,
Till their blushes are seen through their mantles of grey.
The gay-hearted children, but lightly oppressed,
Find perfect relief on their pillow of rest:
For Alice, no bless'd forgetfulness comes;—
The wail of the bugles,—the roll of the drums,—
The musket's sharp crack,—the artillery's roar,—
The flashing of bayonets dripping with gore,—
The moans of the dying,—the horror, the dread,
The ghastliness gathering over the dead,—
Oh! these are the visions of anguish and pain,—
The phantoms of terror that troop through her brain!
She pauses again and again on the floor,
Which the moonlight has brightened so mockingly o'er;
She wrings her cold hands with a groan of despair;
—"Oh, God! have compassion!—my darling is there!"
All placidly, dewily, freshly, the dawn
Comes stealing in pulseless tranquility on:
More freely she breathes, in its balminess, though
The forehead it kisses is pallid with woe.
Through the long summer sunshine the Cottage is stirred
By passers, who brokenly fling them a word:
Such tidings of slaughter! "The enemy cowers;"—
"He breaks!"—"He is flying!"—"Manassas is ours!"
'Tis evening: and Archie, alone on the grass,
Sits watching the fire-flies gleam as they pass,
When sudden he rushes, too eager to wait,—
"Mamma! there's an ambulance stops at the gate!"
Suspense then is past: he is borne from the field,—
"God help me!... God grant it be not on his shield!"
And Alice, her passionate soul in her eyes,
And hope and fear winging each quicken'd step, flies,—
Embraces, with frantical wildness, the form
Of her husband, and finds... it is living, and warm!