’Mid dim and solemn forests, in the dawning chill and gray, Over dank, unrustling leaves, or through stiff and sodden clay, With never a fife or bugle, or mutter of rumbling drum, With shivering forms and solemn souls the Southern soldiers come; Their long lines vanishing in mist as onward they are sweeping, With step as silent as the dawn’s, to where the foe is sleeping. A challenge!--“Halt!”--The expected shot,--and then a dozen more, Like pebbles pattering down the steep the avalanche before; And then a rush, and then a yell, and then a blinding glare, And then a crash to lift the feet resounding everywhere! Now vanish chill and solemn thoughts, now burns the frenzied blood; The tottering tents toss to and fro upon the driving flood, And the campfires flash and darken fast beneath the masses’ tread-- Now smoke behind in scattered brands ’mid wounded men and dead. And forward crowd the fugitives in panic-driven race; In vain in bush, ravine, and brake they hunt a hiding-place; For still that long line onward sweeps unbroken far and near, As War himself, with pinions bowed, were screaming in their rear. But far beyond the panic’s reach the foe is forming fast, And in our path stands rank on rank of long battalions massed. Now, Southern soldiers, nerve your hearts and gather up your strength, The time of trial waited for is come to you at length! A hundred pieces open, and their shrieking missiles pour, While full ten thousand muskets flash and mingle in the roar, Till the cannon’s boom is swallowed in the din of musketry, As the booming of the ocean when the thunders crash on high. But momently our laboring lines are charging o’er the field, And forcing back the stubborn ranks that only inches yield; For at every fence they rally and oppose our surging flood, Till their dead lie heaped before us wherever they have stood. A Southern regiment there is matched against a full brigade, And not a hundred yards apart in open field arrayed; A brook half way between them through a copse of willows glides, There’s not a rock, fence, log, or tree to shelter ours besides. But stubbornly, undauntedly, with ne’er a cheer or shout, With hands too busy for their lips they deal their volleys out.