- end_line
- 2148
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:58.829Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 2035
- text
- II
The May-weed springs; and comes a Man
And mounts our Signal Hill;
A quiet Man, and plain in garb--
Briefly he looks his fill,
Then drops his gray eye on the ground,
Like a loaded mortar he is still:
Meekness and grimness meet in him--
The silent General.
_Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant, and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants,
And the happy world disarm._
That eve a stir was in the camps,
Forerunning quiet soon to come
Among the streets of beechen huts
No more to know the drum.
The weed shall choke the lowly door,
And foxes peer within the gloom,
Till scared perchange by Mosby’s prowling men,
Who ride in the rear of doom.
_Far West, and farther South,
Wherever the sword has been,
Deserted camps are met,
And desert graves are seen._
The livelong night they ford the flood;
With guns held high they silent press,
Till shimmers the grass in their bayonets’ sheen--
On Morning’s banks their ranks they dress;
Then by the forests lightly wind,
Whose waving boughs the pennons seem to bless,
Borne by the cavalry scouting on--
Sounding the Wilderness.
_Like shoals of fish in spring
That visit Crusoe’s isle,
The host in the lonesome place--
The hundred thousand file._
The foe that held his guarded hills
Must speed to woods afar;
For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth
With the slowly-smoked cigar--
The scheme that smouldered through winter long
Now bursts into act--into war--
The resolute scheme of a heart as calm
As the Cyclone’s core.
_The fight for the city is fought
In Nature’s old domain;
Man goes out to the wilds,
And Orpheus’ charm is vain._
In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,
Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat
And cuddled-up skeleton;
And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--
But the Year and the Man were gone.
_At the height of their madness
The night winds pause,
Recollecting themselves;
But no lull in these wars._
A gleam!--a volley! And who shall go
Storming the swarmers in jungles dread?
No cannon-ball answers, no proxies are sent--
They rush in the shrapnel’s stead.
Plume and sash are vanities now--
Let them deck the pall of the dead;
They go where the shade is, perhaps into Hades,
Where the brave of all times have led.
_There’s a dust of hurrying feet,
Bitten lips and bated breath,
And drums that challenge to the grave,
And faces fixed, forefeeling death._
What husky huzzahs in the hazy groves--
What flying encounters fell;
Pursuer and pursued like ghosts disappear
In gloomed shade--their end who shall tell?
The crippled, a ragged-barked stick for a crutch,
Limp to some elfin dell--
Hobble from the sight of dead faces--white
As pebbles in a well.
_Few burial rites shall be;
No priest with book and band
Shall come to the secret place
Of the corpse in the foeman’s land._
Watch and fast, march and fight--clutch your gun?
Day-fights and night-fights; sore is the strees;
Look, through the pines what line comes on?
Longstreet slants through the hauntedness?
’Tis charge for charge, and shout for yell:
Such battles on battles oppress--
But Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well,
And emerged from the Wilderness.
_Emerged, for the way was won;
But the Pillar of Smoke that led
Was brand-like with ghosts that went up
Ashy and red._
- title
- Chunk 1