ts, like youngest children, never grow
Out of their mother's fondness. Nature so
Holds their soft hands, and will not let them go,

Till at the last they track with even feet
Her rhythmic footsteps, and their pulses beat
Twinned with her pulses, and their lips repeat

The secrets she has told them, as their own:
Thus is the inmost soul of Nature known,
And the rapt minstrel shares her awful throne!

O lover of her mountains and her woods,
Her bridal chamber's leafy solitudes,
Where Love himself with tremulous step intrudes,

Her snows fall harmless on thy sacred fire:
Far be the day that claims thy sounding lyre
To join the music of the angel choir!

Yet, since life's amplest measure must be filled,
Since throbbing hearts must be forever stilled,
And all must fade that evening sunsets gild,

Grant, Father, ere he close the mortal eyes
That see a Nation's reeking sacrifice,
Its smoke may vanish from these blackened skies!

Then, when his summons comes, since come it must,
And, looking heavenward with unfaltering trust,
He wraps his drapery round him for the dust,

His last fond glance will show him o'er his head
The Northern fires beyond the zenith spread
In lambent glory, blue and white and red,--

The Southern cross without its bleeding load,
The milky way of peace all freshly strowed,
And every white-throned star fixed in its lost abode!

NOVEMBER 3, 1864.

LEAVES FROM AN OFFICER'S JOURNAL.

II.

CAMP SAXTON, near Beaufort, S.C.
_December 11, 1862._

Haroun Alrashid, wandering in disguise through his imperial streets,
scarcely happened upon a greater variety of groups than I, in my evening
strolls among our own camp-fires.

Beside some of these fires, the men are cleaning their guns or
rehearsing their drill,--beside others, smoking in silence their very
scanty supply of the beloved tobacco,--beside others, telling stories
and shouting with laughter over the broadest mimicry, in which they
excel, and in which the officers come in for a full share. The
everlasting "shout" is always within hearing, with its mixture of piety
and polka, and its castanet-like clapping of the hands. Then there are
quieter prayer-meetings, with pious invocations, and slow psalms,
"deaconed out" from memory by the leader, two lines at a time, in a sort
of wailing chant. Elsewhere, there a