A whiter flag come forth to summon thee
Than that pale scarf which gleamed above war’s stain,
To parley o’er the end of its red reign—
The truce of God that sets from battle free
Thy dauntless soul, and thy worn life from pain.”
Lee O. Harris, a native of Pennsylvania (1839), removed to the State in 1852, and was an Indiana soldier in the Civil War. His verse, as collected in “Interludes” (1893), shows little of the military feeling, but is strongly domestic, a forerunner of the work of Mr. Riley, whose teacher Mr. Harris had been at Greenfield.
Dan L. Paine, an Indianapolis journalist (1830-1895), possessed a sound taste, and his occasional pieces were well executed. He wrote an elegy on the death of his friend and fellow-journalist, George C. Harding, which is a meditation on the courage of such spirits:—
“On Freedom’s heights they stand as sentinels,
Brave tropic suns, delve in earth’s deepest caves,
And climb the ladder of the parallels