Beechenbrook | Page 4

the floor,
Which the moonlight has
brightened so mockingly o'er;
She wrings her cold hands with a groan
of despair;
--"Oh, God! have compassion!--my darling is there!"
All placidly, dewily, freshly, the dawn
Comes stealing in pulseless
tranquility on:
More freely she breathes, in its balminess, though

The forehead it kisses is pallid with woe.
Through the long summer sunshine the Cottage is stirred By passers,
who brokenly fling them a word:
Such tidings of slaughter! "The
enemy cowers;"--
"He breaks!"--"He is flying!"--"Manassas is ours!"
'Tis evening: and Archie, alone on the grass,
Sits watching the
fire-flies gleam as they pass,
When sudden he rushes, too eager to
wait,--
"Mamma! there's an ambulance stops at the gate!"
Suspense then is past: he is borne from the field,--
"God help me!...
God grant it be not on his shield!"
And Alice, her passionate soul in
her eyes,
And hope and fear winging each quicken'd step, flies,--
Embraces, with frantical wildness, the form
Of her husband, and
finds ... it is living, and warm!
III.

Ye, who by the couches of languishing ones,
Have watched through
the rising and setting of suns,--
Who, silent, behind the close curtain,
withdrawn,
Scarce know that the current of being sweeps on,--
To
whom outer life is unreal, untrue,
A world with whose moils ye have
nothing to do;
Who feel that the day, with its multiform rounds,
Is
full of discordant, impertinent sounds,--
Who speak in low whispers,
and stealthily tread,
As if a faint footfall were something to dread,--

Who find all existence,--its gladness, its gloom,--
Enclosed by the
walls of that limited room,--
Ye only can measure the sleepless unrest

That lies like a night-mare on Alice's breast.
Days come and days go, and she watches the strife
So evenly
balanced, 'twixt death and 'twixt life;
Thanks God he still breathes, as
each evening takes wing, And dares not to think what the morrow may
bring.
In the lone, ghostly midnight, he raves as he lies,
With death's ashen
pallidness dimming his eyes:
He shouts the sharp war-cry,--he rallies
his men,--
He is on the red field of Manassas again.
"Now, courage, my comrades! Keep steady! lie low!
Wait, like the
couch'd lion, to spring on your foe:
Ye'll face without flinching the
cannons' grim mouth,
For ye're 'Knights of the Horse-Shoe'--ye're
Sons of the South! There's Jackson!--how brave he rides! coursing at
will, Midst the prostrated lines on the crest of the hill;
God keep him!
for what will we do if he falls?
Be ready, good fellows!--be cool
when he calls
To the charge: Oh! we'll beat them,--we'll turn
them,--and then We'll ride them down madly!--On! Onward! my men!"
The feverish frenzy o'erwearies him soon,
And back on his pillows he
sinks in a swoon.
And sometimes, when Alice is wetting his lip,
He turns from the
draught, and refuses to sip:
--"'Tis sweet, pretty angel!--but yonder

there lies
A famishing comrade, with death in his eyes:
His need is
far greater,... Sir Philip, I think,--
Or was it Sir Philip?... go, go!--let
him drink!"
And oft, with a sort of bewildered amaze,
On her face he would
fasten the wistfullest gaze:
--"You are kind, but a hospital nurse
cannot be
Like Alice,--my tenderest Alice,--to me.
Oh! I know
there's at Beechenbrook, many a tear,
As she asks all the day,--'Will
he never be here?'"
But Nature, kind healer! brings sovereignest balm,
And strokes the
wild pulses with coolness and calm;
The conflict so equal, so stubborn, is past,
And life gains the
hardly-won battle at last.
How sweet through the long convalescence
to lie,
And from the low window, gaze out at the sky,
And float, as
the zephyrs so tranquilly do,
Aloft in the depths of ineffable blue:--

In painless, delicious half consciousness brood,--
No duties to cumber,
no claims to intrude,--
Receptive as childhood, from trouble as free,

And feel it is bliss enough simply, to be!
For Alice,--what pencil can picture her joy,--
So perfect, so thankful,
so free from annoy,
As her lips press the lotus-bound chalice, and
drain
That exquisite blessedness born out of pain!
Oh! not in her
maidenhood, blushing and sweet,
When Douglass first poured out his
love at her feet;
And not when a shrinking and beautiful bride,
With
worshipping fondness she clung to his side;
And not in those holiest
moments of life,
When first she was held to his heart, as his wife;

And never in motherhood's earliest bliss,
Had she tasted a happiness
rounded like this!
And Douglass, safe sheltered from war's rude alarms,
Finds Eden's
lost precincts again in her arms:
He hears afar off, in the distance, the
roar
And the lash of the billows that break on the shore
Of his isle

of enchantment,--his haven of rest,--
And rapturous languor steals
over his breast.
He bathes in the sunlight of Alice's smiles;
He wraps himself round
with love's magical wiles:
His sweet iterations pall not on her ear,--

"I love you--I love you!"--she never can hear
That cadence too often;
its musical roll
Wakes ever an echoed reply in her soul.
--Do visions of trial, of warning, of woe,
Loom dark in the future of
doubt? Do they know
They are hiving, of honied remembrance, a
store
To live on, when summer and