The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's Southern ballad, _Maryland, My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger Horatius_, and the grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old Methodist hymn, to which the Northern armies beat time as they went "marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, 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 home-comings, 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 heartbreaks 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 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.