Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/197

 Our National Cemeteries.

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��he may be still sleeping beneath the sighing pines of Olustee.

As far as practicable, all Federal sol- diers and sailors buried along the sea- board of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, have been removed to Beaufort Cemetery ; and, as Governor Alexander H. Bullock said : " Wherever they offered up their lives, amid the thunder of battle, or on the exhausting march, in victory or in defeat, in hospital or in prison, officers and privates, soldiers and sailors, patriots all, they fell like the beauty of Israel on their high places, burying all distinctions of rank in the august equality of death."

One section of the cemetery is devoted to the Confederates. There are more than a hundred of these, including several commissioned officers ; and on Memorial Days the same ladies who decorate the graves of the Federals decorate also in the same manner the graves of the Confederates ; recognizing that, though in life they were arrayed as mortal enemies, they are now reconciled in " the awful but kindly brotherhood of death." Sir Walter

Scott enjoins : —

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"Speak not for those a separate doom, Whom fate made brothers in the tomb."

And One infinitely greater than Sir Walter has inculcated still loftier senti- ments.

Among the graves to which the at- tention of the writer was particularly

attracted was that of Charley, a

boy of Colonel Putnam's regiment, who had now been dead more years than he

��had lived. His parents, living on the shores of Lake Winnipiseogee, and walking daily over the paths which he had often trod, had plucked the earliest flower of their northern clime and sent it to the superintendent of the cem- etery, to be planted at Charley's grave. The burning sun of South Carolina had not spared that flower ; but something of it still remained. Its mute eloquence spoke to the heart of the tender recol- lections of a father and of a mother's undying love. How truly does Words- worth say, —

" The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

For US who have survived the perils of battle and the far more fatal diseases that wasted our forces, and for all who cherish the memory of these dead, it will always be a consoling thought that the Federal government has done so much to provide honorable sepulture for those who fell in defence of the Union. We can all appreciate Lord Byron's lament for the great Florentine poet and patriot : —

" Ungrateful Florence ! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore."

But we can have no such regret for our lost comrades, buried not upon a foreign, nor upon an unfriendly shore, but in the bosom of the soil which their blood redeemed. Sacred is the tear that is shed for the unreturning brave.

"'Tis the tear through many a long day wept, "Tis life's whole path o'ershaded; 'Tis the one remembrance, fondly kept, When all lighter griefs have faded."

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