Close his eyes; his work is done!
What to him is friend or foeman,
Rise of moon, or set of sun,
Hand of man, or kiss of woman?
Lay him low, lay him low,
In the clover or the snow!
What cares he? he cannot know:
Lay him low!
As man may, he fought his fight,
Proved his truth by his endeavor;...
Break not his sweet repose—
Thou whom chance brings to this sequestered ground,
The sacred yard his ashes close,
But go thy way in silence; here no sound
Is ever heard but from the murmuring pines,
Answering the sea’s near murmur;
Nor ever here comes rumor
Of anxious world or war’s foregathering signs.
The bleaching...
Where swell the songs thou shouldst have sung
By peaceful rivers yet to flow?
Where bloom the smiles thy ready tongue
Would call to lips that loved thee so?
On what far shore of being tossed,
Dost thou resume the genial stave,
And strike again the lyre we lost
By Rappahannock’s troubled wave?
If that new world hath hill...
such is the death the soldier dies:
He falls,—the column speeds away;
Upon the dabbled grass he lies,
His brave heart following, still, the fray.
The smoke-wraiths drift among the trees,
The battle storms along the hill;
The glint of distant arms he sees;
He hears his comrades shouting still.
A glimpse of far-borne...
He sleeps at last—a hero of his race.
Dead!—and the night lies softly on his face,
While the faint summer stars, like sentinels,
Hover above his lonely resting-place.
A soldier, yet less soldier than a man,
Who gave to justice what a soldier can,—
The courage of his arm, a patient heart,
And the fire-soul that flamed when wrong began....
Our bugles sang truce,—for the night-cloud had lowered,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.
When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,
By the wolf-scaring fagot that guarded the slain;
At the dead of the night a sweet vision I...
Close his 1 eyes; his work is done!
What to him is friend or foeman,
Rise of moon or set of sun,
Hand of man or kiss of woman?
Lay him low, lay him low,
In the clover or the snow!
What cares he? he cannot know;
Lay him low!
As man may, he fought his fight,
Proved his truth by his endeavor;...
