Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/67

ALICE OF MONMOUTH 2

The Capital grew aghast with sights

Flashed from the lurid river-heights,

Full of the fearful things sent down,

By demons haunting the middle air,

Into the hot, beleaguered town,—

All woful sights and sounds, which seem

The fantasy of a sickly dream:

Crowded wickedness everywhere;

Everywhere a stifled sense

Of the noonday-striding pestilence;

Every church, from wall to wall,

A closely-mattressed hospital;

And ah! our bleeding heroes, brought

From smouldering fields so vainly fought,

Filling each place where a man could lie

To gasp a dying wish—and die;

While the sombre sky, relentlessly,

Covered the town with a funeral-pall,

A death-damp, trickling funeral-pall.

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Always the dust and mire; the sound

Of the rumbling wagon's ceaseless round,

The cannon jarring the trampled ground.

The sad, unvarying picture wrought

Upon the pitying woman's heart

Of Alice, the Colonel's wife, and taught

Her spirit to choose the better part,—

The labor of loving angels, sent

To men in their sore encompassment.

Daily her gentle steps were bent

Through the thin pathways which divide

The patient sufferers, side from side,

In dolorous wards, where Death and Life

Wage their silent, endless strife; 37