Welcome, with shouts of joy and pride,
Your veterans from the war-path's track;
You gave your boys, untrained, untried;
You bring them men and heroes back!
And shed no tear, though think you must
With sorrow of the martyred band;
Not even for him whose hallowed dust
Has made our prairies holy land.
Though by the places where they fell,
The places that are sacred ground,
Death, like a sullen sentinel,
Paces his everlasting round.
Yet when they set their country free
And gave her traitors fitting doom,
They left their last great enemy,
Baffled, beside an empty tomb.
Not there, but risen, redeemed, they go
Where all the paths are sweet with flowers;
They fought to give us Peace and lo!
They gained a better Peace than ours.
Phœbe Cary.
On May 24, 1865, the united armies of Grant and Sherman, two hundred thousand strong, were reviewed at Washington by President Johnson and his cabinet.
A SECOND REVIEW OF THE GRAND ARMY
[May 24, 1865]
I read last night of the Grand Review
In Washington's chiefest avenue,—
Two hundred thousand men in blue,
I think they said was the number,—
Till I seemed to hear their trampling feet,
The bugle blast and the drum's quick beat,
The clatter of hoofs in the stony street,
The cheers of people who came to greet,
And the thousand details that to repeat
Would only my verse encumber,—
Till I fell in a revery, sad and sweet,
And then to a fitful slumber.