Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/302

 286 Poets of the Civil War I rhymes with "true"; with cheerful unconcern for the rhyme, the Southerners substituted "gray." This song was senti- mental, without poetic merit or rhythm, without even a trick of melody to recommend it, but it voiced the eager longing for peace and was heard in every camp many times every day. Other popular songs weie the Song of the Soldiers by Halpine and I'd rather be a soldier, A tramping, camping soldier by John Savage. All these are primarily concerned with the military side of the conflict. Civil matters, too, found poetic voices : Bret Harte's The Copperhead and The Copperhead Convention, and Thomas Clarke's Sir Copp, stinging denunciations; F. W. Lander's Rhode Island to the South, full of prophetic challenge; Richard Realf's lo Triumphe, hopeful and resolute; W. A. Devon's Give Me Your Hand, Johnny Bull, a friendly, earnest bid for British sympathy. Still more interesting are the nimierous pieces that reveal the feelings of sorrowing men and women at home, and of soldiers sick for home. Specially memorable are Lucy Larcom's Waiting for News, Kate Putnam Osgood's ex- traordinarily pathetic Driving Home the Cows, C. D. Shanly's The Brier Wood Pipe, Augusta Cooper Bristol's Term of Service Ended, Read's The Brave at Home, The Drummer Boy's Burial (anonymous), and William Winter's After All. From civil Hfe came the tender and moving' note of reconciliation in Francis Miles Finch's The Blue and the Gray, written in 1867 when the news came that the women of Columbus, Mississippi, had de- corated the graves both of Northern and Southern soldiers. To civil life, too, belongs the supreme poetry that the war called forth, associated, for the most part, with the name of Lincoln. Stoddard's Abraham Lincoln, Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed (not to be mentioned with the popular but less valuable Captain! My Captain!), and Lowell's Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration. Whit- man had written not a few vivid descriptions of war scenes, and he stands alone among all the poets of his time in his noble freedom from partisanship, but his chanting was never else- where so rapt or melodious. Lowell, a fiery partisan, had in his