Do you hear the traitors who bid you speak
The word that shall sever the sacred tie?
And ye who dwell by the golden peak,
Has the subtle whisper glided by ?
Has it crossed the immemorial plains
To coasts where the gray Pacific roars,
And the Pilgrim blood in the people's veins
Is pure as the wealth of their mountain ores?

Spirits of sons who side by side

In a hundred battles fought and fell,
Whom now no East and West divide,

In the isles where the shades of heroes dwell,

Say, has it reached your glorious rest,

And ruffled the calm which crowns you there?

The shame that recreants have confest

The plot that floats in the troubled air?

Sons of New England, here and there,
Wherever men are still holding by
The honor our fathers left so fair,—

Say, do you hear the cowards' cry?
Crouching amongst her grand old crags,
Lightly our mother heeds their noise,
With her fond eyes fixed on distant flags;
But you do you hear it, Yankee boys?

January 19, 1863.

WITHOUT

a hillock stretched the plain; For months we had not seen a hill;

The endless, flat Savannahs still Wearied our eyes with waving cane.

One tangled cane-field lay before
The ambush of the cautious foe;
Behind a black bayou, with low
Reed-hidden, miry, treacherous shore;

A sullen swamp along the right,

Where alligators slept and crawled, And moss-robed cypress giants sprawled Athwart the noontide's blistering light.

Quick, angry spite of musketry
Proclaimed our skirmishers at work;
We saw their crouching figures lurk
Through thickets firing from the knee.

Our Parrotts felt the distant wood

With humming, shrieking, growling shell: When suddenly the mouth of hell Gaped fiercely for its human food.

A long and low blue roll of smoke
Curled up a hundred yards ahead,
And deadly storms of driving lead
From rifle-pits and cane-fields broke.

Then, while the bullets whistled thick,
And hidden batteries boomed and shelled,
Charge bayonets!" the colonel yelled;
"Battalion forward,-double quick!"

With even slopes of bayonets

Advanced—a dazzling, threatening crestRight toward the rebels' hidden nest, The dark blue, living billow sets.

The color-guard was at my side;

I heard the color-sergeant groan;
I heard the bullet crush the bone;
I might have touched him as he died.

The life-blood spouted from his mouth
And sanctified the wicked land;
Of martyred saviors what a band
Has suffered to redeem the South!

I had no malice in my mind;

I only cried: “Close up! guide right ! ”
My single purpose in the fight

Was steady march with eyes aligned.

I glanced along the martial rows,
And marked the soldiers' eyeballs burn;
Their eager faces hot and stern,—
The wrathful triumph on their brows.

The traitors saw; they reeled and fled :
Fear-stricken, gray-clad multitudes

Streamed wildly toward the covering woods,

And left us victory and their dead.

Once more the march, the tiresome plain,
The Father River fringed with dykes,
Gray cypresses, palmetto spikes,
Bayous and swamps and yellowing canes;

With here and there plantations rolled

In flowers, bananas, orange groves, Where laugh the sauntering negro droves, Reposing from the task of old;

And rarer, half-deserted towns,

Devoid of men, where women scowl,
Avoiding us as lepers foul

With sidling gait and flouting gowns.

Thibodeaux, La., March, 1863.