So much for one of the best of poets as a chronicler. Mr. T. B. Read, in describing Sheridan’s ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek, on the gigantic black horse whose neck, in the language of Job, was clothed with thunder, and the glory of whose nostrils was terrible, says,—
“——Striking his spurs with a terrible oath,
He dashed down the line ’mid a storm of huzzas;
And the wave of retreat checked its course there, because
The sight of the master compelled it to pause.”
It is a matter of acceptation among military men that the retreat had been checked, the lines re-formed, and the tide of battle turned by General Wright before Sheridan’s arrival on the scene of action. All he had to do was to encourage with cheering words, and to infuse into the shattered ranks his own sanguine spirit.
Bret Harte undertook to make a hero of John Burns of Gettysburg, who “stood there heedless of jeer and scoff, calmly picking the rebels off.” Gettysburg people, who know whereof they speak, say that so far from Burns playing the hero in the manner indicated, he was driving his cows, and unwittingly got within the Confederate lines. Realizing his unpleasant position, he scampered homeward in such haste that he scratched his face and tore his clothes in the brambles—the nearest approach to bullet marks of which he could boast.
Even when our poets turn back to earlier periods for inspiration, their little discrepancies are not beyond danger of exposure. In Mr. Longfellow’s beautiful “Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem, at the Consecration of Pulaski’s Banner,” he says,—
“When the dying flame of day
Through the chancel shot its ray,