Be all your offices combined!
Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.”
Patty’s voice died away on the last stanza. RoBards, the lawyer, the pleader, the juggler of words like cannon balls, admired the exalted phrases, the apostrophic strain, but Patty was touched only by the first and third stanzas and like a mournful nightingale she warbled softly to a little tune made up of reminiscences of the opera:
“Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms.”
Only as she trilled it it ran:
“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-ons loo-oo-oo-ooms.”
It got caught in her thoughts and ran through her head for weeks, until unconsciously she was always crooning or whispering the haunting syllables.
It was odd that a city-bred banker’s daughter should have written the most graceful of war elegies. It was odder yet that in a still darker hour when discouragement gripped the unsuccessful North and recruits were deaf to the call, this same woman should fire the country with the most majestic of battle-hymns:
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.