Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/400

 390 CONSOLATIONS OF SOLITUDE

��THE OLD AND THE NEW HERO.

'Mid the thick dust of battle I saw thy tall steed

Bear thee onward, brave chieftain ! to wound and to bleed.

Fire and smoke dimmed thy path, and the trumpet's loud blast

Sang shrill 'midst the death-strokes that round thee fell fast.

Thy sword gleamed afar, and thy sun-gilded crest

Spilled its feathers, like waterfalls, white o'er thy breast.

Now soaring, now sinking, now heard, and now lost,

Still thy voice through the clangor loud called to thine host.

Rank on rank they pressed forward till lost to mine eye,

For the smoke-clouds had swept the bright sun from the sky.

But when evening crept on, veiled in shadows of gray.

The smouldering reek drifted slowly away.

And the roar of the battle had melted to moans,

Where the wounded all night vexed the air with their groans.

No flames from thy musketry glared on the night,

But the fireflies, all flashing with innocent light.

Mocked their blaze, and the thunders that roared from the

hill Were changed to the chant of the lone whippoorwill. And, while dead men heaped up lay in piles far and wide, The hedge cricket sang his short psalm at their side.

Next year, when I roamed through that sorrowful scene,

Where rivers of red threaded valleys of green,

The fresh, blooming fields showed no signs of decay ;

All traces of slaughter had vanished away.

The rank vines had woven their leaves into bowers.

And the forms of the slain were converted to flowers.

All was tranquil : the wounded had ceased from their groans,

Each slept unmolested, a hillock of bones.

Ten thousand strong men, clad in armor of brass.

All martyred — for what ? To prove flesh is but grass.

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