But short was our time of musing;
For the rebel forts discerned
That the whole great fleet was moving,
And their batteries on us turned.
Then Porter burst out from his mortars,
In jets of fiery spray,
As if a volcano had opened
Where his leaf-clad vessels lay.
Howling and screeching and whizzing
The bomb-shells arched on high,
And then, like gigantic meteors,
Dropped swiftly from the sky.
Dropped down on the low, doomed fortress
A plague of iron death,
Shattering earth and granite to atoms
With their puffs of sulphurous breath.
The whole air quaked and shuddered
As the huge globes rose and fell,
And the blazing shores looked awful
As the open gates of hell.
Fort Jackson and Fort Saint Philip,
And the battery on the right,
By this time were flashing and thundering
Out into the murky night.
Through the hulks and the cables, sundered
By the bold Itasca's crew,
Went Bailey in silence, though round him
The shells and the grape-shot flew.
No answer he made to their welcome,
Till abeam Saint Philip bore,
Then, oh, but he sent them a greeting
In his broadsides' steady roar!
Meanwhile, the old man, in the Hartford,
Had ranged to Fort Jackson's side;
What a sight! he slowed his engines
Till he barely stemmed the tide;
Yes, paused in that deadly tornado
Of case-shot and shell and ball,
Not a cable's length from the fortress,
And he lay there, wood to wall.