Chattanooga.
(November, 1863.)
A kindling impulse seized the host
Inspired by heaven’s elastic air;
[10]Their hearts outran their General’s plan,
Though Grant commanded there—
Grant, who without reserve can dare;
And, “Well, go on and do your will”
He said, and measured the mountain then:
So master-riders fling the rein—
But you must know your men.
[10] Although the month was November, the day was in character an October
one—cool, clear, bright, intoxicatingly invigorating; one of those days
peculiar to the ripest hours of our American Autumn. This weather must
have had much to do with the spontaneous enthusiasm which seized the
troops—and enthusiasm aided, doubtless, by glad thoughts of the victory
of Look-out Mountain won the day previous, and also by the elation
attending the capture, after a fierce struggle, of the long ranges of
rifle-pits at the mountain’s base, where orders for the time should have
stopped the advance. But there and then it was that the army took the
bit between its teeth, and ran away with the generals to the victory
commemorated. General Grant, at Culpepper, a few weeks prior to crossing
the Rapidan for the Wilderness, expressed to a visitor his impression of
the impulse and the spectacle: Said he: “I never saw any thing like it:”
language which seems curiously undertoned, considering its application;
but from the taciturn Commander it was equivalent to a superlative or
hyperbole from the talkative.
The height of the Ridge, according to the account at hand, varies along
its length from six to seven hundred feet above the plain; it slopes at
an angle of about forty-five degrees.
On yester-morn in grayish mist,
Armies like ghosts on hills had fought,
And rolled from the cloud their thunders loud
The Cumberlands far had caught:
To-day the sunlit steeps are sought.
Grant stood on cliffs whence all was plain,
And smoked as one who feels no cares;
But mastered nervousness intense
Alone such calmness wears.
The summit-cannon plunge their flame
Sheer down the primal wall,
But up and up each linking troop
In stretching festoons crawl—
Nor fire a shot. Such men appall
The foe, though brave. He, from the brink,
Looks far along the breadth of slope,
And sees two miles of dark dots creep,
And knows they mean the cope.
He sees them creep. Yet here and there
Half hid ’mid leafless groves they go;
As men who ply through traceries high
Of turreted marbles show—
So dwindle these to eyes below.
But fronting shot and flanking shell
Sliver and rive the inwoven ways;
High tops of oaks and high hearts fall,
But never the climbing stays.
From right to left, from left to right
They roll the rallying cheer—
Vie with each other, brother with brother,
Who shall the first appear—
What color-bearer with colors clear
In sharp relief, like sky-drawn Grant,
Whose cigar must now be near the stump—
While in solicitude his back
Heap slowly to a hump.
Near and more near; till now the flags
Run like a catching flame;
And one flares highest, to peril nighest—
He means to make a name:
Salvos! they give him his fame.
The staff is caught, and next the rush,
And then the leap where death has led;
Flag answered flag along the crest,
And swarms of rebels fled.
But some who gained the envied Alp,
And—eager, ardent, earnest there—
Dropped into Death’s wide-open arms,
Quelled on the wing like eagles struck in air—
Forever they slumber young and fair,
The smile upon them as they died;
Their end attained, that end a height:
Life was to these a dream fulfilled,
And death a starry night.
The Armies of the Wilderness.
(1683-64.)
I.
Like snows the camps on southern hills
Lay all the winter long,
Our levies there in patience stood—
They stood in patience strong.
On fronting slopes gleamed other camps
Where faith as firmly clung:
Ah, froward king! so brave miss—
The zealots of the Wrong.
In this strife of brothers
(God, hear their country call),
However it be, whatever betide,
Let not the just one fall.
Through the pointed glass our soldiers saw
The base-ball bounding sent;
They could have joined them in their sport
But for the vale’s deep rent.
And others turned the reddish soil,
Like diggers of graves they bent:
The reddish soil and tranching toil
Begat presentiment.
Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?
They lead a Gray-back to the crag:
“Your earth-works yonder—tell us, man”
“A prisoner—no deserter, I,
Nor one of the tell-tale clan”
His rags they mark: “True-blue like you
Should wear the color—your Country’s, man”
He grinds his teeth: “However that be,
Yon earth-works have their plan.”
Such brave ones, foully snared
By Belial’s wily plea,
Were faithful unto the evil end—
Feudal fidelity.
“Well, then, your camps—come, tell the names”
Freely he leveled his finger then:
“Yonder—see—are our Georgians; on the crest,
The Carolinians; lower, past the glen,
Virginians—Alabamians—Mississippians—Kentuckians
(Follow my finger)—Tennesseeans; and the ten
Camps there—ask your grave-pits; they’ll tell.
Halloa! I see the picket-hut, the den
Where I last night lay.” “Where’s Lee”
“In the hearts and bayonets of all yon men!”
The tribes swarm up to war
As in ages long ago,
Ere the palm of promise leaved
And the lily of Christ did blow.
Their mounted pickets for miles are spied
Dotting the lowland plain,
The nearer ones in their veteran-rags—
Loutish they loll in lazy disdain.
But ours in perilous places bide
With rifles ready and eyes that strain
Deep through the dim suspected wood
Where the Rapidan rolls amain.
The Indian has passed away,
But creeping comes another—
Deadlier far. Picket,
Take heed—take heed of thy brother!
From a wood-hung height, an outpost lone,
Crowned with a woodman’s fort,
The sentinel looks on a land of dole,
Like Paran, all amort.
Black chimneys, gigantic in moor-like wastes,
The scowl of the clouded sky retort;
The hearth is a houseless stone again—
Ah! where shall the people be sought?
Since the venom such blastment deals,
The south should have paused, and thrice,
Ere with heat of her hate she hatched
The egg with the cockatrice.
A path down the mountain winds to the glade
Where the dead of the Moonlight Fight lie low;
A hand reaches out of the thin-laid mould
As begging help which none can bestow.
But the field-mouse small and busy ant
Heap their hillocks, to hide if they may the woe:
By the bubbling spring lies the rusted canteen,
And the drum which the drummer-boy dying let go.
Dust to dust, and blood for blood—
Passion and pangs! Has Time
Gone back? or is this the Age
Of the world’s great Prime?
The wagon mired and cannon dragged
Have trenched their scar; the plain
Tramped like the cindery beach of the damned—
A site for the city of Cain.
And stumps of forests for dreary leagues
Like a massacre show. The armies have lain
By fires where gums and balms did burn,
And the seeds of Summer’s reign.
Where are the birds and boys?
Who shall go chestnutting when
October returns? The nuts—
O, long ere they grow again.
They snug their huts with the chapel-pews,
In court-houses stable their steeds—
Kindle their fires with indentures and bonds,
And old Lord Fairfax’s parchment deeds;
And Virginian gentlemen’s libraries old—
Books which only the scholar heeds—
Are flung to his kennel. It is ravage and range,
And gardens are left to weeds.
Turned adrift into war
Man runs wild on the plain,
Like the jennets let loose
On the Pampas—zebras again.
Like the Pleiads dim, see the tents through the storm—
Aloft by the hill-side hamlet’s graves,
On a head-stone used for a hearth-stone there
The water is bubbling for punch for our braves.
What if the night be drear, and the blast
Ghostly shrieks? their rollicking staves
Make frolic the heart; beating time with their swords,
What care they if Winter raves?
Is life but a dream? and so,
In the dream do men laugh aloud?
So strange seems mirth in a camp,
So like a white tent to a shroud.
II.
The May-weed springs; and comes a Man
And mounts our Signal Hill;
A quiet Man, and plain in garb—
Briefly he looks his fill,
Then drops his gray eye on the ground,
Like a loaded mortar he is still:
Meekness and grimness meet in him—
The silent General.
Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant, and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants,
And the happy world disarm.
That eve a stir was in the camps,
Forerunning quiet soon to come
Among the streets of beechen huts
No more to know the drum.
The weed shall choke the lowly door,
And foxes peer within the gloom,
Till scared perchange by Mosby’s prowling men,
Who ride in the rear of doom.
Far West, and farther South,
Wherever the sword has been,
Deserted camps are met,
And desert graves are seen.
The livelong night they ford the flood;
With guns held high they silent press,
Till shimmers the grass in their bayonets’ sheen—
On Morning’s banks their ranks they dress;
Then by the forests lightly wind,
Whose waving boughs the pennons seem to bless,
Borne by the cavalry scouting on—
Sounding the Wilderness.
Like shoals of fish in spring
That visit Crusoe’s isle,
The host in the lonesome place—
The hundred thousand file.
The foe that held his guarded hills
Must speed to woods afar;
For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth
With the slowly-smoked cigar—
The scheme that smouldered through winter long
Now bursts into act—into waw—
The resolute scheme of a heart as calm
As the Cyclone’s core.
The fight for the city is fought
In Nature’s old domain;
Man goes out to the wilds,
And Orpheus’ charm is vain.
In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay—the rusted gun,
Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat
And cuddled-up skeleton;
And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged—
But the Year and the Man were gone.
At the height of their madness
The night winds pause,
Recollecting themselves;
But no lull in these wars.
A gleam!—a volley! And who shall go
Storming the swarmers in jungles dread?
No cannon-ball answers, no proxies are sent—
They rush in the shrapnel’s stead.
Plume and sash are vanities now—
Let them deck the pall of the dead;
They go where the shade is, perhaps into Hades,
Where the brave of all times have led.
There’s a dust of hurrying feet,
Bitten lips and bated breath,
And drums that challenge to the grave,
And faces fixed, forefeeling death.
What husky huzzahs in the hazy groves—
What flying encounters fell;
Pursuer and pursued like ghosts disappear
In gloomed shade—their end who shall tell?
The crippled, a ragged-barked stick for a crutch,
Limp to some elfin dell—
Hobble from the sight of dead faces—white
As pebbles in a well.
Few burial rites shall be;
No priest with book and band
Shall come to the secret place
Of the corpse in the foeman’s land.
Watch and fast, march and fight—clutch your gun?
Day-fights and night-fights; sore is the strees;
Look, through the pines what line comes on?
Longstreet slants through the hauntedness?
’Tis charge for charge, and shout for yell:
Such battles on battles oppress—
But Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well,
And emerged from the Wilderness.
Emerged, for the way was won;
But the Pillar of Smoke that led
Was brand-like with ghosts that went up
Ashy and red.
None can narrate that strife in the pines,
A seal is on it—Sabaean lore!
Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme
But hints at the maze of war—
Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom,
And fires which creep and char—
A riddle of death, of which the slain
Sole solvers are.
Long they withhold the roll
Of the shroudless dead. It is right;
Not yet can we bear the flare
Of the funeral light.
The Swamp Angel.[11]
[11] The great Parrott gun, planted in the marshes of James Island, and
employed in the prolonged, though at times intermitted bombardment of
Charleston, was known among our soldiers as the Swamp Angel.
St. Michael’s, characterized by its venerable tower, was the historic
and aristrocratic church of the town.
There is a coal-black Angel
With a thick Afric lip,
And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)
In a swamp where the green frogs dip.
But his face is against a City
Which is over a bay of the sea,
And he breathes with a breath that is blastment,
And dooms by a far decree.
By night there is fear in the City,
Through the darkness a star soareth on;
There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith,
Then the poise of a meteor lone—
Lighting far the pale fright of the faces,
And downward the coming is seen;
Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc,
And wails and shrieks between.
It comes like the thief in the gloaming;
It comes, and none may foretell
The place of the coming—the glaring;
They live in a sleepless spell
That wizens, and withers, and whitens;
It ages the young, and the bloom
Of the maiden is ashes of roses—
The Swamp Angel broods in his gloom.
Swift is his messengers’ going,
But slowly he saps their halls,
As if by delay deluding.
They move from their crumbling walls
Farther and farther away;
But the Angel sends after and after,
By night with the flame of his ray—
By night with the voice of his screaming—
Sends after them, stone by stone,
And farther walls fall, farther portals,
And weed follows weed through the Town.
Is this the proud City? the scorner
Which never would yield the ground?
Which mocked at the coal-black Angel?
The cup of despair goes round.
Vainly she calls upon Michael
(The white man’s seraph was he),
For Michael has fled from his tower
To the Angel over the sea.
Who weeps for the woeful City
Let him weep for our guilty kind;
Who joys at her wild despairing—
Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.
The Battle for the Bay.
(August, 1864.)
O mystery of noble hearts,
To whom mysterious seas have been
In midnight watches, lonely calm and storm,
A stern, sad disciple,
And rooted out the false and vain,
And chastened them to aptness for
Devotion and the deeds of war,
And death which smiles and cheers in spite of pain.
Beyond the bar the land-wind dies,
The prows becharmed at anchor swim:
A summer night; the stars withdrawn look down—
Fair eve of battle grim.
The sentries pace, bonetas glide;
Below, the sleeping sailor swing,
And if their dreams to quarters spring,
Or cheer their flag, or breast a stormy tide.
But drums are beat: Up anchor all!
The triple lines steam slowly on;
Day breaks, and through the sweep of decks each man
Stands coldly by his gun—
As cold as it. But he shall warm—
Warm with the solemn metal there,
And all its ordered fury share,
In attitude a gladiatorial form.
The Admiral—yielding the love
Which held his life and ship so dear—
Sailed second in the long fleet’s midmost line;
Yet thwarted all their care:
He lashed himself aloft, and shone
Star of the fight, with influence sent
Throughout the dusk embattlement;
And so they neared the strait and walls of stone.
No sprintly fife as in the field,
The decks were hushed like fanes in prayer;
Behind each man a holy angel stood—
He stood, though none was ’ware.
Out spake the forts on either hand,
Back speak the ships when spoken to,
And set their flags in concert true,
And On and in! is Farragut’s command.
But what delays? ’mid wounds above
Dim buoys give hint of death below—
Sea-ambuscades, where evil art had aped
Hecla that hides in snow.
The centre-van, entangled, trips;
The starboard leader holds straight on:
A cheer for the Tecumseh!—nay,
Before their eyes the turreted ship goes down!
The fire redoubles, While the fleet
Hangs dubious—ere the horror ran—
The Admiral rushes to his rightful place—
Well met! apt hour and man!—
Closes with peril, takes the lead,
His action is a stirring call;
He strikes his great heart through them all,
And is the genius of their daring deed.
The forts are daunted, slack their fire,
Confounded by the deadlier aim
And rapid broadsides of the speeding fleet,
And fierce denouncing flame.
Yet shots from four dark hulls embayed
Come raking through the loyal crews,
Whom now each dying mate endues
With his last look, anguished yet undismayed.
A flowering time to guilt is given,
And traitors have their glorying hour;
O late, but sure, the righteous Paramount comes—
Palsy is on their power!
So proved it with the rebel keels,
The strong-holds past: assailed, they run;
The Selma strikes, and the work is done:
The dropping anchor the achievement seals.
But no, she turns—the Tennessee!
The solid Ram of iron and oak,
Strong as Evil, and bold as Wrong, though lone—
A pestilence in her smoke.
The flag-ship is her singled mark,
The wooden Hartford. Let her come;
She challenges the planet of Doom,
And naught shall save her—not her iron bark.
Slip anchor, all! and at her, all!
Bear down with rushing beaks—and now!
First the Monongahela struck—and reeled;
The Lackawana’s prow
Next crashed—crashed, but not crashing; then
The Admiral rammed, and rasping nigh
Sloped in a broadside, which glanced by:
The Monitors battered at her adamant den.
The Chickasaw plunged beneath the stern
And pounded there; a huge wrought orb
From the Manhattan pierced one wall, but dropped;
Others the seas absorb.
Yet stormed on all sides, narrowed in,
Hampered and cramped, the bad one fought—
Spat ribald curses from the port
Who shutters, jammed, locked up this Man-of-Sin.
No pause or stay. They made a din
Like hammers round a boiler forged;
Now straining strength tangled itself with strength,
Till Hate her will disgorged.
The white flag showed, the fight was won—
Mad shouts went up that shook the Bay;
But pale on the scarred fleet’s decks there lay
A silent man for every silenced gun.
And quiet far below the wave,
Where never cheers shall move their sleep,
Some who did boldly, nobly earn them, lie—
Charmed children of the deep.
But decks that now are in the seed,
And cannon yet within the mine,
Shall thrill the deeper, gun and pine,
Because of the Tecumseh’s glorious deed.