, was marred by its fire-eating
absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "northern scum," the cheap
insults of the southern newspaper press. To furnish the _John Brown_
chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her
_Battle Hymn of the Republic_, a noble poem, but rather too fine and
literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. Among
the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern
time, which told of partings and homecomings, of women waiting by
desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who
had gone to the war, or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism or
sang the thousand private tragedies and heart-breaks of the great
conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive
the feeling of the hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were
Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's
_All Quiet Along the Potomac_, Forceythe Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and
John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of the poets whom the war brought
out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Timrod, of South
Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the {557}
war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as correspondent
for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he became assistant editor of
the _South Carolinian_, at Columbia. Sherman's "march to the sea" broke
up his business, and he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of
his poems was published in 1873, six years after his death. The
prettiest of all Timrod's poems is _Katie_, but more to our present
purpose are _Charleston_--written in the time of blockade--and the
_Unknown Dead_, which tells

"Of nameless graves on battle plains,
Wash'd by a single winter's rains,
Where, some beneath Virginian hills,
And some by green Atlantic rills,
Some by the waters of the West,
A myriad unknown heroes rest."

When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of
these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, _The
Blue and the Gray_, which spoke the word of reconciliation and
consecration for North and South alike.

Brownell, whose _Lyrics of a Day_ and _War Lyrics_ were published
respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on
whose flag-ship, the _Hartford_, he was present at several great naval
engagements, such as the "Passage