Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/91

GETTYSBURG A victory that round the world shall long be told and sung!

It was the memory of the past that bore us through the fray,

That gave the grand old Army strength to conquer on this day!

O now forget how dark and red Virginia's rivers flow,

The Rappahannock's tangled wilds, the glory and the woe;

The fever-hung encampments, where our dying knew full sore

How sweet the north-wind to the cheek it soon shall cool no more;

The fields we fought, and gained, and lost; the lowland sun and rain

That wasted us, that bleached the bones of our unburied slain!

There was no lack of foes to meet, of deaths to die no lack,

And all the hawks of heaven learned to follow on our track;

But henceforth, hovering southward, their flight shall mark afar

The paths of yon retreating hosts that shun the northern star.

At night, before the closing fray, when all the front was still,

We lay in bivouac along the cannon-crested hill.

Ours was the dauntless Second Corps; and many a soldier knew

How sped the fight, and sternly thought of what was yet to do.

Guarding the centre there, we lay, and talked with bated breath

Of Buford's stand beyond the town, of gallant Reynolds' death, 61