“ Ezra Kerr!”—and a voice answered “ Here!”

“Hiram Kerr!”—but no man replied.

They were brothers, these two; the sad wind sighed, And a shudder crept through the cornfield near.

“Ephraim Deane!”—then a soldier spoke:
“Deane carried our regiment's colors," he said,

When our ensign was shot; I left him dead
Just after the enemy wavered and broke.

"Close to the roadside his body lies;

I paused a moment and gave him to drink;

He murmured his mother's name, I think, And Death came with it and closed his eyes.”

'Twas a victory,-yes; but it cost us dear:

For that company's roll, when called at night,

Of a hundred men who went into the fight, Numbered but twenty that answered “Here!”

A SOLDIER POET

BY ROSSITER JOHNSON

Where swell the songs thou shouldst have sung

By peaceful rivers yet to flow?
Where bloom the smiles thy ready tongue

Would call to lips that loved thee so?
On what far shore of being tossed,

Dost thou resume the genial stave,
And strike again the lyre we lost

By Rappahannock's troubled wave?

If that new world hath hill and stream,

And breezy bank, and quiet dell, If forests murmur, waters gleam,

And wayside flowers their story tell, Thy hand ere this has plucked the reed

That wavered by the wooded shore; Its prisoned soul thy fingers freed

To float melodious evermore.

So seems it to my musing mood,

So runs it in my surer thought, That much of beauty, more of good,

For thee the rounded years have wrought; That life will live, however blown

Like vapor on the summer air; That power perpetuates its own;

That silence here is music there.

A GEORGIA VOLUNTEER

BY MARY ASHLEY TOWNSEND

Far up the lonely mountain-side

My wandering footsteps led;
The moss lay thick beneath my feet,

The pine sighed overhead.
The trace of a dismantled fort

Lay in the forest nave,
And in the shadow near my path

I saw a soldier's grave.

The bramble wrestled with the weed

Upon the lowly mound;
The simple head-board, rudely writ,

Had rotted to the ground;
I raised it with a reverent hand,

From dust its words to clear,
But time had blotted all but these-

“A Georgia Volunteer!”

I saw the toad and scaly snake

From tangled covert start,
And hide themselves among the weeds

Above the dead man's heart;
But undisturbed, in sleep profound,

Unheeding, there he lay;
His coffin but the mountain soil,

His shroud Confederate gray.

I heard the Shenandoah roll

Along the vale below,
I saw the Alleghanies rise

Towards the realms of snow.
The “ Valley Campaign” rose to mind-

Its leader's name—and then
I knew the sleeper had been one

Of Stonewall Jackson's men.

Yet whence he came, what lip shall say

Whose tongue will ever tell
What desolated hearths and hearts

Have been because he fell?

What sad-eyed maiden braids her hair,

Her hair which he held dear?
One lock of which perchance lies with

The Georgia Volunteer!

What mother, with long watching eyes,

And white lips cold and dumb,
Waits with appalling patience for

Her darling boy to come?
Her boy! whose mountain grave swells up

But one of many a scar,
Cut on the face of our fair land,

By gory-handed war.

What fights he fought, what wounds he wore,

Are all unknown to fame;
Remember, on his lonely grave

There is not e'en a name!
That he fought well and bravely too,

And held his country dear,
We know, else he had never been

A Georgia Volunteer.

He sleeps—what need to question now

If he were wrong or right?
He knows, ere this, whose cause was just

In God the Father's sight.
He wields no warlike weapons now,

Returns no foeman's thrust-
Who but a coward would revile

An honest soldier's dust?

Roll, Shenandoah, proudly roll,

Adown thy rocky glen,
Above thee lies the grave of one

Of Stonewall Jackson's men.
Beneath the cedar and the pine,

In solitude austere,
Unknown, unnamed, forgotten, lies

A Georgia Volunteer.

THE BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD

BY THEODORE O'HARA

The muffled drum's sad roll has beat

The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on Life's parade shall meet

That brave and fallen few.
On Fame's eternal camping-ground

Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,

The bivouac of the dead.

No rumor of the foe's advance

Now swells upon the wind;
No troubled thought at midnight haunts

Of loved ones left behind;
No vision of the morrow's strife

The warrior's dream alarms;
No braying horn nor screaming fife

At dawn shall call to arms.