PER TENEBRAS LUMINA.

BY MRS. WHITNEY.

I KNOW how, through the golden hours,
When summer sunlight floods the deep,
The fairest stars of all the heaven

Climb up, unseen, the effulgent steep.

Orion girds him with a flame;

And king-like, from the eastward seas, Comes Aldebaran, with his train

Of Hyades and Pleiades.

In far meridian pride, the Twins

Build, side by side, their luminous thrones;

And Sirius and Procyon pour

A splendor that the day disowns.

And stately Leo, undismayed,

With fiery footstep tracks the Sun, To plunge adown the western blaze, Sublimely lost in glories won.

I know, if I were called to keep

Pale morning watch with grief and pain, Mine eyes should see their gathering might Rise grandly through the gloom again.

And when the winter solstice holds

In his diminished path the sun, When hope, and growth, and joy are o'er, And all our harvesting is done,

When, stricken like our mortal life,

Darkened and chill, the year lays down

THE CONFEDERATE PRIMER.

The summer beauty that she wore,

Her summer stars of harp and crown,

Thick trooping with their golden tread

They come, as nightfall fills the sky,
Those strong and solemn sentinels,

To hold their mightier watch on high.

Ah! who shall shrink from dark and cold,
Or fear the sad and shortening days,
Since God doth only so unfold

The wider glory to his gaze?

Since loyal Truth, and holy Trust,
And kingly Strength defying Pain,
Stern Courage, and sure Brotherhood
Are born from out the depths again?

Dear country of our love and pride!
So is thy stormy winter given !
So, through the terrors that betide,
Look up, and hail thy kindling heaven!

193

Atlantic Monthly.

THE CONFEDERATE PRIMER.*

AT Nashville's fall

We sinned all.

* Only those can appreciate this burlesque who know the Alphabet Rhymes in the old New-England Primer, beginning –

In Adam's fall

We sinned all.

And containing also these impressive rhymes,

The cat doth play

And after slay.

The royal oak it was the tree
That saved his royal majesty.

Dedicated to the Georgia Regiments, and others of the C. S. R., that is, the Confederate States Resurrectionists.

BY H. BEDLOW.

You, forsooth, and valor brothers!

You the types of knighthood's braves!

* I should willingly have omitted these verses, which seem like a rhymed combination of the Papal anathema with a treatise on purulent diseases. But they are the expression, gross and fiendish though it be, of a feeling excited in some people by the language

AN IDYL.

Offspring of degraded mothers, -
Suckled at the dugs of slaves!
You at Freedom's holy altars,
Chanting your blaspheming psalm;
Candidates for loyal halters;

Confed'rates in a monstrous sham!

Catiline's own spawn and scions,
Daring what no manhood dares;
Gascons with the lungs of lions,

But the speed and hearts of hares!
Apostates from the faith of sages;
Fools, confounding wrong and right;
Rushing on the thick-bossed ægis
Of fair Freedom's belted knight !

Swaggering braggarts, peculators!
Swindlers of the swell-mob grade!
Fratricidal, perjured traitors!
Heroes of an ambuscade!
Miscreants, scorn of all the nation;
Priesthood of the gyves and lash;
Ruffians, worthier flagellation

Than the nobler slaves you gash!

As 'gainst hell's insurgent banners,
Ithuriel to the battle posts,
Freemen march with loud hosannas,
Freedom lord of loyal hosts.
Some must fall in this endeavor,

But where each sacred corse is found,

To the nation's heart forever,

That dear spot is holy ground.

195

of most and the acts of many rebels during the war. There was not a little of such writing on the rebel side, as the reader may see; but in all the multitudinous mass of verses that I have examined I have found only this example of its kind among loyal writers. The fact that it is unique is another reason for its preservation.

Were you littered, whelps inhuman,

To bay great freedom's climbing moon ? Abortions of the womb of woman!

Dear saints in heaven! a boon, a boon! Curse me now, each foul hyena,

Charnel burglar, ghoul or worse; Make his leprous body leaner,

Than a three-months' buried corse.

In each joint's articulation,

Plant an anguish fixed and sore;
Through the ducts of circulation,
Madness and delirium pour.
In idiot frenzy let him tattle,
How he rifled loyal graves;
Let his limbs with palsy rattle,
Like a gibbet swinging knaves.

Pain and spasm lancinating,

Fill his days and nights with moans ; Cramp and rack excruciating,

Twitch his curséd coward bones. In foretaste of meed hereafter,

Mock his fevered thirst with streams;

Let him hear hell's goblin laughter,
In convulsed and nightmare dreams.

By disease's vitiation,

Corrupt his scoundrel carcass more ; Loathsome forms of suppuration

Abscess, ulcer, cancerous sore. In his own putrescence stifled; By a gangrene agonized; Horrors of the graves he's rifled, In his own flesh vitalized.

In trance's awful consciousness,