Nor could she dance to the viol’s tune, When the drum was throbbing throughout the land, Or dream in the light of the summer moon When Treason was clenching his mailèd hand.
Through the long gray hospital’s corridor She journeyed many a mournful league, And her light foot fell on the oaken floor As if it never could know fatigue.
She stood by the good old surgeon’s side, And the sufferers smiled as they saw her stand; She wrote, and the mothers marvelled and cried At their darling soldiers’ feminine hand.
She was last in the ward when the lights burned low, And sleep called a truce to his foeman Pain; At the midnight cry she was first to go, To bind up the bleeding wound again.
For sometimes the wreck of a man would rise, Weird and gaunt in the watch-lamp’s gleam, And tear away bandage and splints and ties, Fighting the battle all o’er in his dream.
No wonder the youngest surgeon felt A charm in the presence of that brave soul, Through weary weeks, as she nightly knelt With the letter from home or the doctor’s dole.
He heard her called, and he heard her blessed, With many a patriot’s parting breath; And ere his soul to itself confessed, Love leaped to life in those vigils of death.
“Oh, fly to your home!” came a whisper dread, “For now the pestilence walks by night.” “The greater the need of me here,” she said, And bared her arm for the lancet’s bite.
Was there death, green death, in the atmosphere? Was the bright steel poisoned? Who can tell! Her weeping friends gathered beside her bier, And the clergyman told them all was well.
Well—alas that it should be so! When a nation’s debt reaches reckoning-day— Well for it to be able, but woe To the generation that’s called to pay!