The tall and crowning Teneriffe of crime.” I hear a passing bell--the muffled drum Rolls its sepulchral echoes on the night Which spreads across the sky the starless pall Of desolation. And upon my ear Falls the wild burden of a dismal song Like that of mocking fiends in revelry. THE DISUNION BANNER. Fiends who in the lurid gloom Of Hell do ply the fatal loom, Weave a banner of despair For Columbia’s tainted air, Like the boding raven’s wing All the land o’ershadowing. In the murky woof embroider Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder. On the fatal standard show Every form of guilt and woe-- Murder drinking deep of blood, Rolling round him like a flood, All the fetid gall that drips From the land’s infected lips, In the murky woof embroider Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder. Weave ye in the magic loom Piles of slain without a tomb, Cities lit with midnight fires, Crashing walls and toppling spires, Famine’s sunken, ghastly cheek, Outraged woman’s helpless shriek, Hoary age and infancy Plunged in one wide misery; In the murky woof embroider Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder. Let the banner’s fold be bound With a fiery serpent round; Eden’s destroyer shall recall The new temptation, sin, and fall. We have changed the stripes of flame To the burning blush of shame, And the streaks of spotless white To the pallor of affright, And the stars which blazoned all To Wormwood in its endless fall. The song of treason ceased--the phantoms fled, And as I mused in the dark bitterness Of grief to this sad prophecy of woe, I heard a sound, as when the ocean moves His moist battalions to the tempest’s march, To storm the fortress of the rocky isles, And hosts innumerable thronged around In panoply of war. From every height And every valley rolled the martial drum, And bugles calling to the gory charge The loyal and the bold, while streamed on high Gay banners glittering with the hues of heaven. “We come, oh, bleeding country,” was their cry, “To beat aside the parricidal steel, And shield the snowy breast that gave us life.”