to Southern arms. Then a year of disaster came and red fires lit up the horizon. The lurid gleam shone horrible with visions of dismay, distress and shame, and the pain went home to myriads of Southern hearts. Another year, grand with victories, terrible in carnage, swept in full-orbed glory by. We turn from the threshold of the fourth to look back through the vista of fire, and view, amidst its sacred scenery, the features of the dead!
Animate in death, in battle front, gory on breast and cheek and arm, and palled in the smoke of the first Manassas, Bee and Bartow lie. Upon the blooming prairies of Kentucky another battle "rides upon the storm," and the noble Zollicoffer falls expiring under the very gaze of the exultant foe. Still deeper on the distance of the West, under a storm of lead, brave men, mingling with their allied brothers of the forest, mourn over McCulloch and McIntosh, whose priceless blood the thirsty sod drinks in beneath their feet. At Shiloh a martyr falls. In the mountainous wilds of Northern Virginia, the Ashbys, sublime in deeds, almost invulnerable, pour out their life. The young and chivalrous Wise accepts, on the treacherous shores of Roanoke Island, that "other choice" of heroes—death—and dies in triumph, though a captive; and the brave and brilliant Latane falls in the deadly fray that illuminates the arms of Stuart's men in the charge at Hanover.
But wept by the very stars of Heaven, that trembled as they looked upon those midnight flashes in the Wilderness, the bleeding form of the Achilles of the South, Stonewall Jackson, meets, with its drapery of sadness, the wandering gaze—on which a country calls in vain and will not realize her loss—for
"she remembers thee as one
Long loved, but for a season gone;
For thee her Poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For 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."
The scene ends not here; but the review becomes burthensome with sorrow. The living still must add, alas! to the endless roll of death. As in the past, a fiery and uncalculating courage has marked both the men and leaders of the Southern Army, we must anticipate for the future many and costly sacrifices. We have many, as the record of these pages will attest, yet to adorn the field and inspire the charge; but none, none to spare. As the war drags its slow length along, all will be needed, and though it seems not in their nature, we yet trust that it will be in their power, to husband their courage and succeed.
