3. Always the dust and mire; the sound Of the rumbling wagon’s ceaseless round, The cannon jarring the trampled ground. The sad, unvarying picture wrought Upon the pitying woman’s heart Of Alice, the Colonel’s wife, and taught Her spirit to choose the better part,— The labor of loving angels, sent To men in their sore encompassment. Daily her gentle steps were bent Through the thin pathways which divide The patient sufferers, side from side, In dolorous wards, where Death and Life Wage their silent, endless strife; And she gave to all her soothing words, Sweet as the songs of homestead birds. Sometimes that utterance musical On the soldier’s failing sense would fall Seeming, almost, a prelude given Of whispers that calm the air of Heaven; While her white hand, moistening his poor lips With the draught which slakeless fever sips, Pointed him to that fount above,— River of water of life and love,— Stream without price, of whose purity Whoever thirsteth may freely buy. 4. How many—whom in their mortal pain She tended—’twas given her to gain, Through Him who died upon the rood, For that divine beatitude, Who of us all can ever know Till the golden books their records show? But she saw their dying faces light, And felt a rapture in the sight. And many a sufferer’s earthly life Thanked for new strength the Colonel’s wife; Many a soldier turned his head, Watching her pass his narrow bed, Or, haply, his feeble frame would raise, As the dim lamp her form revealed; And, like the children in the field, (For soldiers like little ones become,— As simple in heart, as frolicsome,) One and another breathed her name, Blessing her as she went and came. 5. So, through all actions pure and good, Unknowing evil, shame, or fear, She grew to perfect ladyhood,— Unwittingly the mate and peer Of the proudest of her husband’s blood. XI. 1. Like an affluent, royal town, the summer camps Of a hundred thousand men are stretched away. At night, like multitudinous city lamps, Their numberless watch-fires beacon, clear and still, And a glory beams from the zenith lit With lurid vapors that over its star-lights flit; But wreaths of opaline cloud o’erhang, by day, The crystal-pointed tents, from hill to hill, From vale to vale—until The heavens on endless peaks their curtain lay. A magical city! spread to-night On hills which slope within our sight: To-morrow, as at the waving of a wand, Tents, guidons, bannerols are moved afar,— Rising elsewhere, as rises a morning-star, Or the dream of Aladdin’s palace in fairy-land.