And Irish Nora's eyes are dim
For a singer, dumb and gory;
And English Mary mourns for him
Who sang of "Annie Lawrie."
Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest
Your truth and valor wearing:
The bravest are the tenderest,—
The loving are the daring.
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
At midnight, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power:
In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring:
Then pressed that monarch's throne—a king;
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,
As Eden's garden bird.
At midnight, in the forest shades,
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote 2 band,
True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.
Marco Bozzaris. A Greek patriot (1790-1823), killed in the War of Independence against Turkey.
2. Suliote. Grecian troops from Souli.
There had the Persian's thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Platæa's day;
And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arm to strike and soul to dare,
As quick, as far as they.
An hour passed on-the Turk awoke;
That bright dream was his last;
He woke to hear his sentries shriek,
"To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!"
He woke to die midst flame, and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and saber stroke,
And death shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain cloud;
And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:
"Strike-till the last armed foe expires;
Strike-for your altars and your fires;
Strike for the green graves of your sires;
God and your native land!"
They fought-like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain,
They conquered-but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their proud hurrah,
And the red field was won;
Then saw in death his eyelids close
Calmly, as to a night's repose,
Like flowers at set of sun.
At the battle of Plataea the Greeks won a great victory over the Persians, 479 B. C.
Come to the bridal-chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm
With banquet song, and dance, and wine;
And thou art terrible-the tear,
The groan, the knell,. the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.
But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought-
Come, with her laurel leaf, blood-bought-
Come in her crowning hour—and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight
Of sky and stars to prisoned men;
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,*
When the land wind, from woods of palm, And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee-there is no prouder grave, Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume Like torn branch from death's leafless tree In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb;
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved and for a season gone;
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babe's first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said
At palace couch and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears.
For him the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears;
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh;
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's:
One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.
FRANCIS ORRAY TICKNOR
Out of the focal 2 and foremost fire,
Out of the hospital walls as dire;
Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene,
(Eighteenth battle, and he sixteen!)
Specter! such as you seldom see,
Little Giffen, of Tennessee!
"Take him and welcome!" the surgeons said;
Little the doctor can help the dead!
So we took him; and brought him where
The balm was sweet in the summer air;
And we laid him down on a wholesome bed,
Utter Lazarus,3 heel to head!
And we watched the war with abated breath,—
Skeleton Boy against skeleton Death.
Months of torture, how many such?
Weary weeks of the stick and crutch;
And still a glint of the steel-blue eye
Told of a spirit that wouldn't die,
And didn't. Nay, more! in death's despite
The crippled skeleton "learned to write."
"Dear mother," at first, of course; and then
"Dear captain," inquiring about the men.
Captain's answer: "Of eighty-and-five,
Giffen and I are left alive."
1. This story of a young private in the Confederate army is taken from real life.
2. Focal fire. The point upon which the firing was concentrated. Lazarus. A man covered with sores.
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