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A BATTLE BALLAD
by Ticknor, Francis Orrery [1822-1874]

A summer Sunday morning,
July the twenty-first,
In eighteen hundred sixty-one,
The storm of battle burst.
For many a year the thunder
Had muttered deep and low,
And many a year, through hope and fear,
The storm had gathered slow.
Now hope had fled the hopeful,
And fear was with the past;
And on Manassas' cornfields
The tempest broke at last.
A wreath above the pine-tops,
The booming of a gun;
A ripple on the cornfields,
And the battle was begun.
A feint upon our centre,
While the foeman massed his might,
For our swift and sure destruction,
With his overwhelming "right."
All the summer air was darkened
With the tramping of their host;
All the Sunday stillness broken
By the clamor of their boast.
With their lips of savage shouting,
And their eyes of sullen wrath,
Goliath, with the weaver-beam,
The champion of Gath.
Are they men who guard the passes,
On our "left" so far away?
In the cornfields, O Manassas!
Are they
men
who fought to-day?
Our
boys
are brave and gentle,
And their brows are smooth and white;
Have they grown to
men
, Manassas,
In the watches of a night?
Beyond the grassy hillocks
There are tents that glimmer white;
Beneath the leafy covert
There is steel that glistens bright.
There are eyes of watchful reapers
Beneath the summer leaves,
With a glitter as of sickles
Impatient for the sheaves.
They are men who guard the passes,
They are men who bar the ford;
Stands our David at Manassas,
The champion of the Lord.
They are men who guard our altars,
And beware, ye sons of Gath,
The deep and dreadful silence
Of the lion in your path.
Lo! the foe was mad for slaughter,
And the whirlwind hurtled on;
But our
boys
had grown to heroes,
They were
lions
, every one.
And they stood a wall of iron,
And they shone a wall of flame,
And they beat the baffled tempest
To the caverns whence it came.
And Manassas' sun descended
On their armies crushed and torn,
On a battle bravely ended,
On a nation grandly born.
The laurel and the cypress,
The glory and the grave,
We pledge to thee, O Liberty!
The life-blood of the brave.
Francis Orrery Ticknor.

Source: Project Gutenberg

Source: Project Gutenberg