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Who will comfort her in sorrow?

Who will dry the falling tear,
Gently smooth her wrinkled forehead?
Who will whisper words of cheer?

Even now I think I see her

Kneeling, praying for me! How
Can I leave her in her anguish ?
Who will comfort mother now?

Let this knapsack be my pillow,
And my mantle be the sky;
Hasten, comrades, to the battle,
I will like a soldier die.
Soon with angels I'll be marching,
With bright laurels on my brow,
I have for my country fallen,

Who will care for mother now?

This song is said to have been suggested by the recollection of a bloody battle. Whether this is true or not, makes little difference. It became immensely popular, and it is claimed that these two songs and "Mother Would Comfort Me," also written by Mr. Sawyer, had an aggregate sale of three million copies during the war.

The Federal Union, a journal published at Milledgeville, Ga., makes the following comments on Mr. Sawyer's songs of the war: "Charles

Carroll Sawyer is one of the most gifted sons of the North. His songs gush from his soul as naturally as the water gushes from the mountain

rock, and they are just as pure, sweet, and refreshing. His sentiments are fraught with the greatest tenderness and never one word has he written about the South or the war that could wound the sore chords of the Southern heart. We trust that his songs will be sung and his exquisite airs will be warbled and played throughout our sunny regions, and that the heart of the South will rise up to shake hands with all such hearts as his whenever and wherever they meet them, or from whatsoever point of the compass they hail."

Mr. Sawyer was a very useful war poet, although he did not write anything distinctively great like Julia Ward Howe, George F. Root, Henry C. Work, or Walter Kittredge. But his songs served a noble purpose, and their kindly influence will be long remembered. He died at his home in Brooklyn, October 3d, 1891, at the age of fifty-eight years.

The incidents given in the preceding pages show how important is the history made by these national songs and battle hymns. The story of their influence should never grow dull to the American people. Like the deeds of devotion and heroism which saved the Union, these songs should live forever to make the American character devoted and heroic. They teach the highest form of

patriotism, from which young men and women of to-day can learn much which will inspire higher manhood and womanhood.

I think that we are yet too near the civil war to comprehend the fulness of its greatness, or the true value of its songs. When that strife, and the patriotic spirit it evoked, are a long distance in the past, the historians will write of these grand songs of the Union in a way which will make them the most interesting of all the great transactions of history.

In part adopting the sentiment of another, "this America of ours is the Mt. Sinai of the nations"; and if the divine law of liberty, and one flag, and an inseverable national bond of patriotism and unity have proceeded out of the terrible thunder and lightning of its great struggle, it is in a large sense because the grand passions of the soul in that conflict found expression in songs of mighty power, which inspired loyalty and courage, and made the way to victory easier.

B

CHAPTER XVII.

"HOME, SWEET HOME."

IANCOLELLI, the celebrated buffoon, kept Paris audiences in a roar of laughter, while he himself was dying with melancholy.

Work wrote the most gladsome song of the rebellion period, "Marching Through Georgia," but was the saddest of all our war poets. Blacklock, in his majestic hymn, "Come, O My soul! in Sacred Lays," had a beautiful conception of God in the stars and "enthroned amid the radiant spheres," but he never saw the glory of the stars, the beauty of a summer sky, or the splendor of the noonday sun. Payne wrote the loveliest home song the world ever sang, "Home, Sweet Home," but not after the age of thirteen, when his mother died, did he know what it was to have a home, and closed his strange life on the distant shores of the Mediterranean.

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