The house is ashes where I dwelt,
Beyond the mighty inland sea;
The tombstones shattered where I knelt,
By that old church at Pointe Coupee.
The Yankee fiends, that came with fire,
Camped on the consecrated sod,
And trampled in the dust and mire
The Holy Eucharist of God!
The spot where darling mother sleeps,
Beneath the glimpse of yon sad moon,
Is crushed, with splintered marble heaps,
To stall the horse of some dragoon.
God! when I ponder that black day
It makes my frantic spirit wince;
I marched--with Longstreet--far away,
But have beheld the ravage since
The tears are hot upon my face,
When thinking what bleak fate befell
The only sister of our race--
A thing too horrible to tell.
They say that, ere her senses fled,
She rescue of her brothers cried;
Then feebly bowed her stricken head,
Too pure to live thus--so she died.
Two of those brothers heard no plea;
With their proud hearts forever still--
John shrouded by the Tennessee,
And Arthur there at Malvern Hill.
But I have heard it everywhere,
Vibrating like a passing knell;
'Tis as perpetual as the air,
And solemn as a funeral bell.
By scorched lagoon and murky swamp
My wrath was never in the lurch;
I've killed the picket in his camp,
And many a pilot on his perch.
With steady rifle, sharpened brand,
A week ago, upon my steed,
With Forrest and his warrior band,
I made the hell-hounds writhe and bleed.