Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

Excerpt

Misgivings.

(1860.)

  When ocean-clouds over inland hills    Sweep storming in late autumn brown,  And horror the sodden valley fills,    And the spire falls crashing in the town,  I muse upon my country's ills—  The tempest bursting from the waste of TimeOn the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.  Nature's dark side is heeded now—    (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—  A child may read the moody brow    Of yon black mountain lone.  With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,  And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

(1860-1.)

The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860-1, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions, affected some minds that believed them to constitute one of the great hopes of mankind, much as the eclipse which came over the promise of the first French Revolution affected kindred natures, throwing them for the time into doubt and misgivings universal.

On starry heights  A bugle wails the long recall;Derision stirs the deep abyss,  Heaven's ominous silence over all.Return, return, O eager Hope,  And face man's latter fall.Events, they make the dreamers quail;Satan's old age is strong and hale,A disciplined captain, gray in skill,And Raphael a white enthusiast still;Dashed aims, at which Christ's martyrs pale,Shall Mammon's slaves fulfill?    (Dismantle the fort,    Cut down the fleet—    Battle no more shall be!    While the fields for fight in æons to come    Congeal beneath the sea.)The terrors of truth and dart of death  To faith alike are vain;Though comets, gone a thousand years,    Return again,Patient she stands—she can no more—And waits, nor heeds she waxes hoar.    (At a stony gate,    A statue of stone,    Weed overgrown—    Long 'twill wait!)But God his former mind retains,  Confirms his old decree;The generations are inured to pains,  And strong NecessitySurges, and heaps Time's strand with wrecks.  The People spread like a weedy grass,  The thing they will they bring to pass,And prosper to the apoplex.The rout it herds around the heart,  The ghost is yielded in the gloom;Kings wag their heads—Now save thyself  Who wouldst rebuild the world in bloom.    (Tide-mark    And top of the ages' strike,    Verge where they called the world to come,    The last advance of life—    Ha ha, the rust on the Iron Dome!)Nay, but revere the hid event;  In the cloud a sword is girded on,I mark a twinkling in the tent  Of Michael the warrior one.Senior wisdom suits not now,The light is on the youthful brow.    (Ay, in caves the miner see:    His forehead bears a blinking light;    Darkness so he feebly braves—    A meagre wight!)But He who rules is old—is old;Ah! faith is warm, but heaven with age is cold....