Who dreads to the dust returning? Who shrinks from the sable shore, Where the high and haughty yearning Of the soul shall sting no more! Ho! stand to your glasses, steady! The world is a world of lies; A cup to the dead already-- Hurrah for the next that dies!
Cut off from the land that bore us, Betrayed by the land we find, Where the brightest have gone before us, And the dullest remain behind-- Stand, stand to your glasses, steady! 'T is all we have left to prize; A cup to the dead already-- And hurrah for the next that dies!
ALL day long the storm of battle through the startled valley swept; All night long the stars in heaven o'er the slain sad vigils kept.
O, the ghastly upturned faces gleaming whitely through the night! O, the heaps of mangled corses in that dim sepulchral light!
One by one the pale stars faded, and at length the morning broke; But not one of all the sleepers on that field of death awoke.
Slowly passed the golden hours of that long bright summer day, And upon that field of carnage still the dead unburied lay.
Lay there stark and cold, but pleading with a dumb, unceasing prayer, For a little dust to hide them from the staring sun and air.
But the foeman held possession of that hard-won battle-plain, In unholy wrath denying even burial to our slain.
Once again the night dropped round them,--night so holy and so calm That the moonbeams hushed the spirit, like the sound of prayer or psalm.
On a couch of trampled grasses, just apart from all the rest, Lay a fair young boy, with small hands meekly folded on his breast.
Death had touched him very gently, and he lay as if in sleep; Even his mother scarce had shuddered at that slumber calm and deep.
For a smile of wondrous sweetness lent a radiance to the face, And the hand of cunning sculptor could have added naught of grace
To the marble limbs so perfect in their passionless repose, Robbed of all save matchless purity by hard, unpitying foes.
And the broken drum beside him all his life's short story told: How he did his duty bravely till the death-tide o'er him rolled.
Midnight came with ebon garments and a diadem of stars, While right upward in the zenith hung the fiery planet Mars.
Hark! a sound of stealthy footsteps and of voices whispering low, Was it nothing but the young leaves, or the brooklet's murmuring flow?