Ho! pony. Down the
lonely road
Strike now your cheeriest pace!
The woods
on fire do not burn higher
Than burns my anxious face;
Far have you sped, but all this night
Must feel my
nervous spur;
If we be late, the world must wait
The
tidings we aver:��
To home and hamlet, town and hearth,
To thrill child, mother, man,
I carry to the waiting
North
Great news from Sheridan!
The birds are dead
among the pines,
Slain by the battle fright,
Prone in
the road the steed reclines
That never readied the fight;
Yet on we go,��the wreck below
Of many a tumbled wain,��
By ghastly pools where stranded mules
Die, drinking of
the rain;
With but my list of killed and missed
I spur
my stumbling nag,
To tell of death at many a tryst,
But victory to the flag!
"Halt! who comes there? The
countersign!"��
"A friend."��"Advance! The fight,��
How goes it, say?"��"We won the day!"��
"Huzza! Pass
on!"��"Good-night!"��
And parts the darkness on before,
And down the mire we tramp,
And the black sky is painted
o'er
With many a pulsing camp;
O'er stumps and ruts,
by ruined huts,
Where ghosts look through the gloam,��
Behind my tread I hear the dead
Follow the news toward
home!
The hunted souls I see behind,
In swamp and
in ravine,
Whose cry for mercy thrills the wind
Till
cracks the sure carbine;
The moving lights, which scare
the dark,
And show the trampled place
Where, in his
blood, some mother's bud
Turns up his young, dead face;
The captives spent, whose standards rent
The conqueror
parades,
As at the Five Forks roads arrive
The
General's dashing aides.
O wondrous Youth! through
this grand ruth
Runs my boy's life its thread;
The
General's fame, the battle's name,
The rolls of maimed
and dead
I bear, with my thrilled soul astir,
And
lonely thoughts and fears;
And am but History's courier
To bind the conquering years;
A battle-ray, through ages
gray
To light to deeds sublime,
And flash the lustre
of this day
Down all the aisles of Time!
Ho!
pony,��'tis the signal gun
The night-assault decreed;
On Petersburg the thunderbolts
Crash from the lines of
Meade;
Fade the pale, frightened stars o'erhead,
And
shrieks the bursting air;
The forest foliage, tinted red,
Grows ghastlier in the glare;
Though in her towers,
reached her last hours,
Rocks proud Rebellion's crest��
The world may sag, if but my nag
Get in before the rest!
With bloody flank, and fetlocks dank,
And goad, and
lash, and shout��
Great God! as every hoof-beat falls
A hundred lives beat out!
As weary as this broken steed
Reels down the corduroys,
So, weary, fight for morning
light
Our hot and grimy boys;
Through ditches wet,
o'er parapet
And guns barbette, they catch
The last,
lost breach; and I,��I reach
The mail with my despatch!
Sure it shall speed, the land to read,
As sped the
happiest shell!
The shot I send strike the world's end;
This tells my pony's knell;
His long race run, the long
war done,
My occupation gone,��
Above his bier, prone
on the pier,
The vultures fleck the dawn.
Still, rest
his bones where soldiers dwell,
Till the Long Roll they
catch.
He fell the day that Richmond fell,
And took
the first despatch! |
