When aloft in morning sunlight
Flags were flaunted,

And "swift vengeance on the rebel"
Proudly vaunted:

Little did they think that night
Should close upon their shameful flight,
And rebels, victors in the fight,
Stand undaunted.

But peace to those who perished
In our passes!

Light be the earth above them;
Green the grasses!
Long shall Northmen rue the day
When they met our stern array,
And shrunk from battle's wild affray
At Manassas.

CATHERINE M. WARFIELD.

A BATTLE BALLAD

TO GENERAL J. E. JOHNSTON

A SUMMER Sunday morning,
July the twenty-first,
In eighteen hundred sixty-one,
The storm of battle burst.

For many a year the thunder

Had muttered deep and low,

And many a year, through hope and fear,

The storm had gathered slow.

Now hope had fled the hopeful, And fear was with the past; And on Manassas' cornfields The tempest broke at last.

A wreath above the pine-tops,
The booming of a gun;
A ripple on the cornfields,

And the battle was begun.

A feint upon our centre,

While the foeman massed his might, For our swift and sure destruction, With his overwhelming "right."

All the summer air was darkened
With the tramping of their host;
All the Sunday stillness broken
By the clamor of their boast.

With their lips of savage shouting, And their eyes of sullen wrath, Goliath, with the weaver-beam, The champion of Gath.

Are they men who guard the passes,
On our "left" so far away?

In the cornfields, O Manassas!
Are they men who fought to-day?

Our boys are brave and gentle,

And their brows are smooth and white; Have they grown to men, Manassas, In the watches of a night?

Beyond the grassy hillocks

There are tents that glimmer white; Beneath the leafy covert

There is steel that glistens bright.

There are eyes of watchful reapers
Beneath the summer leaves,
With a glitter as of sickles
Impatient for the sheaves.

They are men who guard the passes,
They are men who bar the ford;
Stands our David at Manassas,
The champion of the Lord.

They are men who guard our altars,
And beware, ye sons of Gath,
The deep and dreadful silence
Of the lion in your path.

Lo! the foe was mad for slaughter,
And the whirlwind hurtled on;
But our boys had grown to heroes,

They were lions, every one.

And they stood a wall of iron,

And they shone a wall of flame, And they beat the baffled tempest To the caverns whence it came.

And Manassas' sun descended

On their armies crushed and torn, On a battle bravely ended,

On a nation grandly born.

The laurel and the cypress,

The glory and the grave, We pledge to thee, O Liberty! The life-blood of the brave.

FRANCIS ORRERY TICKNOR.