Mute Seminary there,
Filled once with resonant hymn and prayer,
How your meek walls and windows shuddered then!
Though Doubleday stemmed the flood,
McPherson's Wood and Willoughby's Run
Saw ere the set of sun
The light of the gospel of blood.
And, on the morrow again,
Loud the unholy psalm of battle
Burst from the tortured Devil's Den,
In cries of men and musketry rattle
Mixed with the helpless bellow of cattle
Torn by artillery, down in the glen;
While, hurtling through the branches
Of the orchard by the road,
Where Sickles and Birney were walled with steel,
Shot fiery avalanches
That shivered hope and made the sturdiest reel.
Yet peach-bloom bright as April saw
Blushed there anew, in blood that flowed
O'er faces white with death-dealt awe;
And ruddy flowers of warfare grew,
Though withering winds as of the desert blew,
Far at the right while Ewell and Early,
Plunging at Slocum and Wadsworth and Greene,
Thundered in onslaught consummate and surly;
Till trembling nightfall crept between
And whispered of rest from the heat of the whelming strife.
But unto those forsaken of life
What has the night to say?
Silent beneath the moony sky,
Crushed in a costly dew they lie:
Deaf to plaint or paean, they:--
Freed from Earth's dull tyranny.
V
Wordless the night-wind, funereal plumes of the tree-tops swaying--
Writhing and nodding anon at the beck of the unseen breeze!
Yet its voice ever a murmur resumes, as of multitudes praying:
Liturgies lost in a moan like the mourning of far-away seas.
May then those spirits, set free, a celestial council obeying,
Move in this rustling whisper here thro' the dark, shaken trees?--
Souls that are voices alone to us, now, yet linger, returning
Thrilled with a sweet reconcilement and fervid with speechless desire?
Sundered in warfare, immortal they meet now with wonder and yearning,
Dwelling together united, a rapt, invisible choir:
Hearken! They wail for the living, whose passion of battle, yet burning,
Sears and enfolds them in coils, and consumes, like a serpent of fire!