The course of uneventful life Ran smoothly on, unmarred by strife, Till childish fancy disappeared, As manhood's sterner age was neared; Then in a city's bustling mart, The cords of fate drew us apart, Through paths of accident and chance, Environment and circumstance; Within their complicated maze, We reached that parting of the ways, Where sentiment is nipped by frost, Where ties of consanguinity Disrupt, and often disagree, Or, through indifference are lost. We happened that eventful spring, To hold a family gathering, To reunite each severed tie So soon to be dissolved for aye. As famines, with their blight respond, When some vile genius waves his wand, And leave a ghastly aftermath Of bleaching bones to mark their path; Or demon hands, in foul offence, Pour out the vials of pestilence, To reap, with desolating breath, A harvest of untimely death; The throes of internecine war Now rent the nation to its core, And smote, with decimating hand The best and bravest of the land, Estranging, never to amend, Father from son and friend from friend; Dissolving many sacred cords Of love in bitterest enmity. Lips once replete with friendly words Now challenged as an enemy; We, who had never quarrelled before, Parted in wrath, and met no more. His firm convictions led him where A banner floated in the air, In silken corrugations curled, The admiration of a world; Beneath its constellated stars, Its azure field and crimson bars, Although no message ever came To tell his fate, or spread his fame, I know that 'mid the shot and shell He served the cause he fought for, well. For aught I know, his manly form Went down before some leaden storm, And lay with mangled flesh and bone Among the numberless unknown, Who filled the trenches where they died, Uncoffined, unidentified. The voice of duty led me where The strains of Dixie filled the air, Where curling smoke in graceful rings Rose on the evening's silent wings, And hovering o'er the mist and damp, Betrayed the presence of the camp. I pass the story of the war,-- The cause we lost, but struggled for Through four long years, in southern fens,-- To wiser tongues and abler pens. Through four long years of tragedy, I fought, bled, marched and starved with Lee, Till Appomattox's final day, I, in a uniform of gray, Before the cannon's yawning mouth, Defended my beloved South. The struggle ending, in complete, Although most honorable defeat, Footsore and hungry, broken, sad, In ragged regimentals clad, Towards Rappahannock's silver flood, I plodded homeward through the mud, To find a desolated home, The final page in war's red tome.