One moment on the battle's edge he stood,
Hope's halo like a helmet round his hair,
The next beheld him dabbled in his blood,
Prostrate in death, and yet in death how fair.
And thus he passed through the red gate of strife,
From earthly crowns and palms to an immortal life.
A brother bore his body from the field,
And gave it unto stranger hands, that closed
The calm blue eyes, on earth forever sealed,
And tenderly the slender limbs composed :-
Strangers, yet sisters, who with Mary's love
Sat by the tomb, and weeping looked above.
A little child strewed roses on his bier
Pale roses not more stainless than his soul, Nor yet more fragrant than his life sincere,
That blossomed with good actions,-brief but whole.
The aged matron and the faithful slave
Approached with reverent feet the hero's lowly grave.
No man of God might say the burial rite
Above the "rebel "-thus declared the foe
That blanched before him in the deadly fight;
But woman's voice, in accents soft and low,
Trembling with pity, touched with pathos, read
O'er his hallowed dust the ritual for the dead.
"Tis sown in weakness, it is raised in power,"
Softly the promise floated on the air,
And the sweet breathings of the sunset hour
Came back responsive to the mourner's prayer
Gently they laid him underneath the sod,
And left him with his fame, his country, and his God.
Let us not weep for him whose deeds endure,
So young, so brave, so beautiful he died;
As he had wished to die;-the past is sure
Whatever yet of sorrow may betide
Those who still linger on the stormy shore,
Change cannot harm him now, nor fortune touch him
And when Virginia, leaning on her spear,
Victrix et vidua,* the conflict done,
Shall raise her mailed hand to wipe the tear
That starts as she recalls each martyred son,
No prouder memory her breast shall sway,
Than thine, our early lost, lamented Latané!
SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.
Memoriæ Sacrum.
BY JAMES BARRON HOPE.
ALAS! he's cold!
Cold as the marble which his fingers wrought-
Cold but not dead, for each embodied thought
Of his, which he from the Ideal brought
Assures him immortality of fame.
The beautiful image in the concluding stanza is borrowed (and some of the language is versified) from the eloquent remarks of Hon. B. M. T. Hunter, on the death of ex-President Tyler.
And coming generations, in the noon
Of his full reputation, yet shall stand
To pay their homage to his noble name.
Our Poet of the Quarries only sleeps:
He cleft his pathway up the future's steeps
And now rests from his labors.
For him there is no death,
Only the stopping of the pulse and breath.
But simple breath is not the all in all-
Man hath it but in common with the brutes:-
Life is in action, and in brave pursuits.
By what we dream, and having dreamt, dare do,
We hold our places in the world's large view,
And still have part in the affairs of men
When the long sleep is on us.
He dreamt and made his dreams perpetual things,
Fit for the rugged cells of penitential saints,
Our halls of sumptuous kings,
And showed himself a poet in his art.
He chiselled lyrics with a touch so fine,
With such a tender beauty of their own,
That unset songs broke out from every line,
And verse was audible in voiceless stone.
His Psyche, soft in beauty and in placid grace, Waits for her lover in the western breeze,
And a rare smile irradiates her face,
As though she heard him whisper in the trees.
Bacchante, with her vine-crowned hair,
Leaps to the cymbal-measured dance,
With such a passion in her air-
Upon her brow-upon her lips-
As thrills you to the finger-tips,
And fascinates your glance.
There are, as 'twere, two of his songs in stone-
The one, full of the tenderness of love,
Speaking of moonrise and the song-bird's call:-
The other of mad laughter and the tone
Of fatal music, on whose rise and fall
Swift-footed dancers follow.
Sweet Lyrics, dreams dreamt 'neath the summer trees,
He worked some Epic studies out in part,
To leave them incomplete, his chiefest pain
When the low pulses of his failing heart
Admonished him of death.
Aye! he had soared upon a lofty wing
Wet with the purple and uncrimsoned rain
Of dreams whose clouds had floated o'er his brain.
Until it ached with glories.
If you would see the Epic studies, go-
Go with the student from the dim arcade.
Halt where the Statesman* standeth in the hall,
* His Jefferson, at the University of Virginia.
And mark how careless voices hush and fall, And all light talk to sudden pause is brought When fronted with the noble type of thought' He shaped from pale Carara.
View his Columbus. Hero grand and meek,
Scarred in the battle's long protracted brunt,
Palos and Salvador stamped on his front—
A second Atlas, bearing on his brow
A new world just discovered.
These of the many, but they are enough—
Enough to show that I have rightly said,
The marble snow from him bids back decay-
He sleepeth long, but sleeps not with the dead.
They die and are forgotten ere the clay
Heaped over them hath hardened in the sun.
This much of Galt the Artist :
Fain would I speak, but in sad sooth
Ne'er find the words wherein to tell
How he was loved, or yet how well
He did deserve it.
All things of beauty were to him delight—
The sunset's clouds the turret rent apart,
The stars, which glitter in the noon of night,
Spoke with one voice unto his mind and heart-
His love of Nature made his love of Art.
Of life been longer, he had surely done
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