And THEY died standing, in the cause
Of the great South, on Honor's field-
Here every patriot hero sleeps

On "unsurrendered shield,"*

This is the record on the stone

Which tells their story for all time,

And generations yet unborn

Shall call their fate sublime.

V.

From all the South they came to us-
For freedom valiantly they bled,
And sleep upon Virginia's breast
Embraced with her own dead.

Twice victors on the self-same field

Where once their columns swept the plain.

Our mother takes them to her heart

They did not die in vain!

1

No, not in vain! They leave behind
Their history of duty done-
Of pangs and agonies endured,
And many a red field won.

*Inscription on monument.

When Summer's sun blazed in the blue

And changed it to a brazen arch,

And dried the streams, they struggled on

The hot and dusty march.

When Winter's blasts pierced through their frames,

Untented in the fields they lay,

And braved the bitter frosts of night,

The sleets and snows of day.

When battle called them forth to bleed,

Proudly they marched, though clad in rags :

And as they died, like soldiers true,

They fell around their flags.

O, glorious Flag! O, righteous Cause !
O, glorious struggle to be free!
O, glorious sleepers! Ye, indeed,
Were fit to follow Lee!

THE CHARGE AT BALAKLAVA.

[From the Richmond Enquirer of May 27, 1874.1

We spare the space to-day to reproduce James Barron Hope's splendid poem descriptive of that sublime exhibition of British chivalry and heroism, the famous charge at Balaklava. We do this in honor of our friends the British settlers now in the city, as it is one the noblest tributes ever paid by an American poet to English valor. While there are many who admire Tennyson's poem, and are partial to the English laureate from sincere and honest motives, yet we cannot help saying that to our mind his verses intended to immortalize one of the grandest events that has occurred to illustrate the history of our race since the chivalric days of old, have been completely overshadowed in real excellence, true pathos and genuine poetry as well as in the treatment of the subject itself by our humbler and less pretentious Virginia poet. No American, much less Englishman, we think, can read this magnificent poem, combining as it does all the wild and incongruous elements of battle, victory, defeat, death, and glory in its triumphant rhmyth, without feeling his heart stirred to its deepest depths by the grandest emotions known to our higher nature. Lacking Tennyson's cue for passion, with no voice of nature knocking at his heart or call to duty tugging at its cords, this tribute from an alien, and a stranger to his father's house and home, while rivaling in grandeur and beauty the impulsive heart-throbbings of the native son still proves that nobility of soul knows no favored clime or sky; that great deeds and high thoughts spring up on every soil, and are admired by the brave and noble in every land-while it grandly exemplifies the truth of brave old Tatnall's memorable declaration-"Blood is thicker than water."