They snug their huts with the chapel-pews, In court-houses stable their steeds-- Kindle their fires with indentures and bonds, And old Lord Fairfax’s parchment deeds; And Virginian gentlemen’s libraries old-- Books which only the scholar heeds-- Are flung to his kennel. It is ravage and range, And gardens are left to weeds. _Turned adrift into war Man runs wild on the plain, Like the jennets let loose On the Pampas--zebras again._ Like the Pleiads dim, see the tents through the storm-- Aloft by the hill-side hamlet’s graves, On a head-stone used for a hearth-stone there The water is bubbling for punch for our braves. What if the night be drear, and the blast Ghostly shrieks? their rollicking staves Make frolic the heart; beating time with their swords, What care they if Winter raves? _Is life but a dream? and so, In the dream do men laugh aloud? So strange seems mirth in a camp, So like a white tent to a shroud._ II The May-weed springs; and comes a Man And mounts our Signal Hill; A quiet Man, and plain in garb-- Briefly he looks his fill, Then drops his gray eye on the ground, Like a loaded mortar he is still: Meekness and grimness meet in him-- The silent General. _Were men but strong and wise, Honest as Grant, and calm, War would be left to the red and black ants, And the happy world disarm._ That eve a stir was in the camps, Forerunning quiet soon to come Among the streets of beechen huts No more to know the drum. The weed shall choke the lowly door, And foxes peer within the gloom, Till scared perchange by Mosby’s prowling men, Who ride in the rear of doom. _Far West, and farther South, Wherever the sword has been, Deserted camps are met, And desert graves are seen._ The livelong night they ford the flood; With guns held high they silent press, Till shimmers the grass in their bayonets’ sheen-- On Morning’s banks their ranks they dress; Then by the forests lightly wind, Whose waving boughs the pennons seem to bless, Borne by the cavalry scouting on-- Sounding the Wilderness. _Like shoals of fish in spring That visit Crusoe’s isle, The host in the lonesome place-- The hundred thousand file._ The foe that held his guarded hills Must speed to woods afar; For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth With the slowly-smoked cigar-- The scheme that smouldered through winter long Now bursts into act--into war-- The resolute scheme of a heart as calm As the Cyclone’s core. _The fight for the city is fought In Nature’s old domain; Man goes out to the wilds, And Orpheus’ charm is vain._