SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE.

PIRIT whose work is done! spirit of dreadful hours!

SPIRIT

Ere, departing, fade from my eyes your forests of

bayonets—

Spirit of gloomiest fears and doubts, yet onward ever unfaltering pressing!

Spirit of many a solemn day, and many a savage scene! Electric spirit!

That with muttering voice, through the years now closed,

like a tireless phantom flitted,

Rousing the land with breath of flame, while you beat and beat the drum;

—Now, as the sound of the drum, hollow and harsh to the last, reverberates round me;

As your ranks, your immortal ranks, return, return from the battles;

While the muskets of the young men yet lean over their shoulders;

While I look on the bayonets bristling over their shoulders ;

While those slanted bayonets, whole forests of them, appearing in the distance, approach and pass on, re

turning homeward,

Moving with steady motion, swaying to and fro, to the right and left,

Evenly, lightly, rising and falling, as the steps keep time: —Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day;

Touch my mouth, ere you depart—press my lips close! Leave me your pulses of rage! bequeath them to me! fill me with currents convulsive!

Let them scorch and blister out of my chants, when you are gone;

Let them identify you to the future in these songs!

RECONCILIATION.

W

ORD over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly,

softly wash again, and ever again, this soiled world. For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—

I draw near;

I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

AFTER THE WAR.

O the leavened soil they trod, calling, I sing, for the

To

last;

Not cities nor man alone, nor war, nor the dead:

But forth from my tent emerging for good—loosing, unty

ing the tent-ropes;

In the freshness, the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and vistas, again to peace restored;

To the fiery fields emanative, and the endless vistas beyond —to the south and the north;

To the leavened soil of the general western world, to attest

my songs,

To the average earth, the wordless earth, witness of war

and peace,

To the Alleghanian hills, and the tireless Mississippi,

To the rocks I, calling, sing, and all the trees in the woods,

To the plain of the poems of heroes, to the prairie spread

ing wide,

To the far-off sea, and the unseen winds, and the sane im

palpable air.

And responding they answer all (but not in words),

The average earth, the witness of war and peace,

ledges mutely;

acknow

The prairie draws me close, as the father, to bosom broad,

the son :—

The Northern ice and rain, that began me, nourish me to

the end;

But the hot sun of the South is to ripen my songs.

WALT WHITMAN.