What she might have been in these times of ours,
At once it is easy and hard to guess;
For always a riddle are half-used powers,
And always a power is lovingness.

But her fortunes fell upon evil days

If days are evil when evil dies,

And she was not one who could stand at gaze
Where the hopes of humanity fall and rise.

Nor could she dance to the viol's tune

When the drum was throbbing throughout the

land,

Or dream in the light of the summer moon

When Treason was clenching his mailéd hand.

Through the long gray hospital's corridor
She journeyed many a mournful league,
And her light foot fell on the oaken floor
As if it never could know fatigue.

She stood by the good old surgeon's side,

And the sufferers smiled as they saw her stand;
She wrote, and the mothers marvelled and cried
At their darling soldiers' feminine hand.

She was last in the ward when the lights burned low,
And Sleep called a truce to his foeman Pain;
At the midnight cry she was first to go,

To bind up the bleeding wound again.

For sometimes the wreck of a man would rise,
Weird and gaunt in the watch-lamp's gleam,
And tear away bandage and splints and ties,
Fighting the battle all o'er in his dream.

No wonder the youngest surgeon felt

A charm in the presence of that brave soul, Through weary weeks, as she nightly knelt

With the letter from home or the doctor's dole.

He heard her called, and he heard her blessed,
With many a patriot's parting breath;
And ere his soul to itself confessed,

Love leaped to life in those vigils of death.

"O, fly to your home!" came a whisper dread,
"For now the pestilence walks by night."
"The greater the need of me here," she said,
And bared her arm for the lancet's bite.

Was there death, green death, in the atmosphere? Was the bright steel poisoned? Who can tell! Her weeping friends gathered beside her bier, And the clergyman told them all was well.

Well-alas that it should be so !

When a nation's debt reaches reckoning-dayWell for it to be able, but woe

To the generation that's called to pay!

Down from the long gray hospital came

Every boy in blue who could walk the floor;

The sick and the wounded, the blind and the lame, Formed two long files from her father's door.

There was grief in many a manly breast,
While men's tears fell as the coffin passed;
And thus she went to the world of rest,
Martial and maidenly up to the last.

And that youngest surgeon, was he to blame?—
He held the lancet-Heaven only knows.

No matter; his heart broke all the same,
And he laid him down, and never arose.

So Death received, in his greedy hand,
Two precious coins of the awful price
That purchased freedom for this dear land-

For master and bondman-yea, bought it twice.

Such fates too often such women are for!
God grant the Republic a large increase,
To match the heroes in time of war,
And mother the children in time of peace.
ROSSITER JOHNSON.

THE LAST REGIMENT.

["In a pretty little village in Louisiana, destroyed by shells toward the end of the war, on a bayou back from the river, a great number of very old men had been left by their sons and grandsons, while they went to the war. And these old men, many of them veterans of other wars, formed themselves into a regiment, made for themselves uniforms, picked up old flint-lock guns, even mounted a rusty old cannon, and so prepared to go to battle if ever the war came within their reach. Toward the close of the war, some gunboats came down the river, shelling the shore. The old men heard the firing, and, gathering together, they set out with their old muskets and rusty old cannon to try to reach the river over the corduroy road through the cypress swamp. They marched out right merrily that hot day, shouting and bantering to encourage each other, the dim fires of their old eyes burning with desire of battle, although not one of them was young enough or strong enough to stand erect. And they never came back any more. shells from the gunboats set the dense and sultry woods on fire. The old men were shut in by the flames-the gray beards and the gray moss and the gray smoke together."]

The

THE dying land cried; they heard her death call; These bent, bearded men stopped, listened in

tent;

Then rusty old muskets rushed down from the wall,
And squirrel-guns gleamed in that regiment,
And grandsires marched, old muskets in hand,
The last men left in the whole Southland.

The gray grandsires! They were seen to reel,
Their rusty old muskets a wearisome load:

They marched, scarce tall as the cannon's wheel,
Marched merrily on up the corduroy road;
These gray old boys, all broken and bent,
Marched out, the gallant last regiment.

But, oh! that march through the cypress trees,
When zest and excitement had died away!
That desolate march through the marsh to the
knees-

These gray grandsires in their robes of gray,
These gray grandsires all broken and bent,-
The gray moss mantling the regiment.

The gray bent men and the mosses gray !
The dull dead gray of the uniform!
The dull dead skies, like to lead that day,
Dull, dead, heavy, and deathly warm!
Oh, what meant more than the cypress meant,
With its mournful moss, to that regiment?

That deadly march through the marshes deep !—
That sultry day, and the deeds in vain!

The rest on the cypress roots, the sleep-
The sleeping never to rise again!

The rust on the guns! The rust and the rent—
That dying and desolate regiment!

The muskets left leaning against the trees!

The cannon wheels clogged from the moss o'erhead!

The cypress trees kneeling on obstinate knees
As gray men kneeled by the gray men dead!
A lone bird rising, long-legged and gray,
Slow rising, and rising, and drifting away!

The dank dead mosses gave back no sound;
The drums lay silent as the drummers there;
The sultry stillness was so profound

You might have heard an unuttered prayer;
And ever and ever, and far away,
Kept drifting that desolate bird in gray.

The long gray shrouds of that cypress wood,
Like veils that sweep where the gray nuns

weep

That cypress moss o'er the dankness deep, Why, the cypress roots they were running blood; And to right and to left lay an old man dead-A mourning cypress set foot and head.

'Twas man hunting man in the wilderness there;
'Twas man hunting man, and hunting to slay;
But nothing was found but death that day,
And possibly God, in that poisonous air;
And possibly God-and that bird in gray
Slow rising, and rising, and drifting away.
Now down in the swamp where the gray men fell
The fire-flies volley and volley at night,
And black men belated are heard to tell

Of the ghosts in gray in a mimic fight-
Of the ghosts of the gallant old men in gray
Who silently died in the swamp that day.

JOAQUIN MILLER.

"SHOT THROUGH THE HEART."

[In memory of Lieutenant John R. Porter, of Alabama, who fell, shot through the heart, at the battle of Frank lin, Tenn., November 30, 1864.]

ACROSS the brown and wintry morn,
Borne on the soft wind's wing,

The weird sweet chords of a New Year's Song
Are struck by the coming Spring—

Ah, would 'twere last year's Spring!

Under the leaves the violet bends,
Laden with scented breath;

Do they bend and blow thus sweetly
Where the wooing air is death?
Can flowers bloom in death?