Do you hear the traitors who bid you speak Spirits of sons who side by side In a hundred battles fought and fell, 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, Say, do you hear the cowards' cry? 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 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 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 Then, while the bullets whistled thick, 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; The life-blood spouted from his mouth I had no malice in my mind; I only cried: “Close up! guide right ! ” Was steady march with eyes aligned. I glanced along the martial rows, The traitors saw; they reeled and fled : Streamed wildly toward the covering woods, And left us victory and their dead. Once more the march, the tiresome plain, With here and there plantations rolled In flowers, bananas, orange groves, Where laugh the sauntering negro droves, Reposing from the task of old; |