Lamar Fontaine describes graphically the effect upon contending armies
of the strains of “Home, Sweet Home”:
Just before “taps” every band, on both sides, sent the
strains of that immortal song, “Home, Sweet Home,” in
soul-stirring notes out on the wings of the night, quivering
and reverberating, with endless echoes from hill, dale, and
valley--and answered by a thousand brass instruments, bass and
kettledrums, and more than a hundred thousand living throats.
It was a time and scene never to be forgotten, for in that hour
Yank and Reb were kin, and the horrors of war, the groans of
the dead and dying upon the bleak, wind-swept field of death at
our very feet were forgotten, and the whole armies of the gray
and blue were wafted back to the quiet fireside of mother and
father, wife and babes, far, far from the bloody, corpse-strewn
plain beneath us.--“My Life and My Lectures.”
(1416)
* * * * *
How few people go into raptures over home. Helen T. Churchill did at
least in this poem:
One spot alone on earth
Is fair to me--
There centers all the mirth,
There I would be.
There, only there, God’s sunlight pierces through
And all the heaven paints with stainless blue.
You praise this land as fair,
Its streams, its bow’rs;
The common weeds are there
As rarest flow’rs--
The fields Elysian. Ah, why should we roam?
One spot alone enchants--we call it home!
(Text.)--_The Woman’s Home Companion._
(1417)
See HEAVEN OUR HOME.