O crocuses with rain-wet eyes, O tender-lipped anemones, What do ye know of agony and death and blood-won victories? No shadow breaks your sunshine-trance, Though near you rolls, with slow advance, Clouding your shining leaves with dust, the anguishladen ambulance. Yonder a white encampment hums; The clash of martial music comes; And now your startled stems are all a-tremble with the jar of drums. Whether it lessen or increase, Or whether trumpets shout or cease, Still deep within your tranquil hearts the happy bees are murmuring "Peace!" O flowers! the soul that faints or grieves Sweet confidence and patient faith are hidden in your healing leaves. Help us to trust, still on and on, That this dark night will soon be gone, And that these battle-stains are but the blood-red trouble of the dawn, Dawn of a broader, whiter day Than ever blessed us with its ray, A dawn beneath whose purer light all guilt and wrong shall fade away. Then shall our nation break its bands, Stand in the searching light unshamed, with spotless robes, and clean, white hands. Elizabeth Akers Allen. THE NESTS AT WASHINGTON. EFORE the White House portals BEFO The careless eyes behold Three iron bombs uplifted, In dreamy mood I wandered "Black seeds of desolation," "Unholy with the holy, In Sabbath's peaceful ray?" Angel of Dust and Darkness! With noise of all earth's battles, Answer: "Let there be Death!" I thought of many a midnight, I saw beleaguered bastions Asleep in peaceful sunshine Flew tenderest summer wings! Deep in the awful chambers The wrens their nests had builded Angel of Resurrection! Over all buried strife I heard thy bird-song whisper, Wilmington, N. C. RUNNING THE BLOCKADE. A CHASE IN SOUNDINGS. OVE in the stays, she lay, HOWE In the blockading grounds The good ship Heir of Lynn: The very focus of light; Where the sea grows hot and white, As if it had turned to salt Or solid rock, with a fault That clipped the horizon's edge In the summer of sixty-three, Over its shadow, under The sea, in curious wonder. Not a cat's-paw turned the streamer, To spell at it letter by letter; And for fifty leagues and better, You could see the smoke of a steamer Drifting down in the offing. You could hear the sullen coughing, - Over sixty miles away, Uneasily looked the master Now at the sea, and then Off in a dream again Of home, as the boa's'in cast her And the master was Joe" again, With his messmate, Geordie of Maine, - Like the small blue flowers that live but a day, The skies got bluer and bluer, 1 Deep sea. |