No More Learning

"--and the grim colonel
smiled when the orderly came back at last.
Strangely the soldier paused: "Well, they were
punished. " And strange his face, aghast.
"Yes, our fire told on them; knocked over fifty--
laid out in line of parade.
Brave fellows, colonel, to stay as they did! But
one I 'most wish had n't stayed.
Mortally wounded, he'd torn off his knapsack;
and then at the end he prayed--
Easy to see, by his hands that were clasped;
and the dull, dead fingers yet held
This little letter--his wife's--from the knapsack.
A pity those woods were shelled! "

Silent the orderly, watching with tears in his eyes
as his officer scanned
Four short pages of writing. "What's this, about
'Marthy Virginia's hand'? "
Swift from his honeymoon he, the dead soldier,
had gone from his bride to the strife;
Never they met again, but she had written him,
telling of that new life,
Born in the daughter, that bound her still closer
and closer to him as his wife.
Laying her baby's hand down on the letter,
around it she traced a rude line;
"If you would kiss the baby," she wrote, "you
must kiss this outline of mine. "

There was the shape of the hand on the page,
with the small, chubby fingers outspread.
"Marthy Virginia's hand, for her pa,"--so the
words on the little palm said.
Never a wink slept the colonel that night, for
the vengeance so blindly fulfilled;
Never again woke the old battle-glow when the
bullets their death-note shrilled.
Long ago ended the struggle, in union of
brotherhood happily stilled;
Yet from that field of Antietam, in warning and
token of love's command,
See! there is lifted the hand of a baby--Marthy
Virginia's hand!






GETTYSBURG: A BATTLE ODE


I

Victors, living, with laureled brow,
And you that sleep beneath the sward!
Your song was poured from cannon throats:
It rang in deep-tongued bugle-notes:
Your triumph came; you won your crown,
The grandeur of a world's renown.
But, in our later lays,
Full freighted with your praise,
Fair memory harbors those whose lives, laid down
In gallant faith and generous heat,
Gained only sharp defeat.
All are at peace, who once so fiercely warred:
Brother and brother, now, we chant a common chord.


II

For, if we say God wills,
Shall we then idly deny Him
Care of each host in the fight?
His thunder was here in the hills
When the guns were loud in July;
And the flash of the musketry's light
Was sped by a ray from God's eye.
In its good and its evil the scheme
Was framed with omnipotent hand,
Though the battle of men was a dream
That they could but half understand.
Can the purpose of God pass by him?
Nay; it was sure, and was wrought
Under inscrutable powers:
Bravely the two armies fought
And left the land, that was greater than they, still theirs and ours!


III

Lucid, pure, and calm and blameless
Dawned on Gettysburg the day
That should make the spot, once fameless,
Known to nations far away.
Birds were caroling, and farmers
Gladdened o'er their garnered hay,
When the clank of gathering armors
Broke the morning's peaceful sway;
And the living lines of foemen
Drawn o'er pasture, brook, and hill,
Formed in figures weird of omen
That should work with mystic will
Measures of a direful magic--
Shattering, maiming--and should fill
Glades and gorges with a tragic
Madness of desire to kill.
Skirmishers flung lightly forward
Moved like scythemen skilled to sweep
Westward o'er the field and nor'ward,
Death's first harvest there to reap.
You would say the soft, white smoke-puffs
Were but languid clouds asleep,
Here on meadows, there on oak-bluffs,
Fallen foam of Heaven's blue deep.
Yet that blossom-white outbreaking
Smoke wove soon a martyr's shroud.