A summer Sunday morning,
July the twenty-first,
In eighteen hundred sixty-one,
The storm of battle burst.
For many a year the thunder
Had muttered deep and low,
And many a year, through hope and fear,
The storm had gathered slow.
Now hope had fled the hopeful,
And fear was with the past;
And on Manassas' cornfields
The tempest broke at last.
A wreath above the pine-tops,
The booming of a gun;
A ripple on the cornfields,
And the battle was begun.
A feint upon our centre,
While the foeman massed his might,
For our swift and sure destruction,
With his overwhelming "right."
All the summer air was darkened
With the tramping of their host;
All the Sunday stillness broken
By the clamor of their boast.
With their lips of savage shouting,
And their eyes of sullen wrath,
Goliath, with the weaver-beam,
The champion of Gath.
Are they men who guard the passes,
On our "left" so far away?
In the cornfields, O Manassas!
Are they men who fought to-day?
Our boys are brave and gentle,
And their brows are smooth and white;
Have they grown to men, Manassas,
In the watches of a night?
Beyond the grassy hillocks
There are tents that glimmer white;
Beneath the leafy covert
There is steel that glistens bright.