were a new one, or at least had its source in the events of the present day, and as if what they call the Trent outrage were without a precedent, and also as if we were always eager for a quarrel with them, would do well to read the unpretending production of this anonymous parodist, and then take the little trouble that will be needful to discover, if they do not know already, the facts about this matter.

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The

Perhaps the most interesting of these little poems are those which express the feelings and emotions of the actors and sufferers in the struggle, and portray the various phases of our social and political life during those four years of eventful memory. variety of these is very great, and their general faithfulness to fact very noteworthy. From Mr. Cutler's Lullaby," so simple, so tender, and so true, that it seems hardly more than a literal record of what must have been sung in twilight hours by thousands of sadhearted women in farmsteads and cities the country over, to Lieutenant Realf's "Io Triumphe!" in which the whole nation's faith and hope, repentance and rejoicing, struggle into words that, in their alternate pause and rush, reflect the turbulence of the time, from the cry, in "The Potomac, 1861," of the girl bereaved of her lover, to the "Horatian Ode,” in which Mr. Stoddard tells, in prolonged but well-sustained quatrains, the style of which smacks rather of England in the first quarter of the seventeenth century than of Rome in the first, a people's sober, deco

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PREFACE.

XV

rous grief at the violent death of Abraham Lincoln, the gradation is full and perfect. No man, no woman, lacks a representative voice, and it would seem that no passing emotion, more than any abiding sentiment, fails of expression. How unexaggerated in all their strength most of these poems now are seen to be by us! The writers seem to have found in their imaginations the real facts, and in their fancies the words that most truthfully expressed them. Even the terrible threat which closes General Lander's "Rhode Island to the South," and which might have been not without reason looked upon by a mere spectator of the struggle as a poetical hyperbole pushed to the verge of extravagance, proved to be hardly more than a' literal announcement of what was to happen. And yet, striking as are such utterances (and there are others like this) of a determination to maintain the republic at whatever cost of life, there is throughout these compositions a notable absence of sanguinary or revengeful feeling, or even of hatred, a negative trait rendered the more remarkable by the single manifestation of that feeling among the many loyal pieces, and its frequent recurrence among the few written by rebel pens. Coming under this class, and yet having characteristic traits of their own, are the poems which paint the home life and the daily trials of the people that furnished the volunteer soldiers who did the fighting of this war. Such are "Driving Home the Cows," "A Woman's Waiting," "The

Song of the Camps," "After All," and "The Heart of the War." No painted picture, no long-drawn description, could give a more faithful and vivid portraiture. of rural life in the Free States during the war than these compositions, and some others like them, scattered through this volume, most of them anonymous, and written for the columns of a newspaper or a magazine by people who lived among the scenes which they describe. "Driving Home the Cows" might be called as faithful as a photograph, were it not that in addition to its faithfulness it tells a tale that can only be told by human lips, and embodies a feeling that will only take form under the touch of human hands. It is noteworthy that the rebel poetry furnishes no corresponding pictures of life and character in whatever class. I have looked for them in vain.

Whether we have reason to be proud or ashamed of the poetry produced by our civil war, most of it written by unpractised hands,-it will be for each reader to decide for himself after perusal of this volume; but this I may venture to say from knowledge, that these poems being arranged in the order of time, the book tells the story of the war like a rhymed chronicle.

My thanks are due to the authors of many of the following poems for permission that they should appear in these pages. Some are printed without such permission, because I knew not where or how to

address their authors, and others because they had

been already so often quoted as to be almost common property. My acknowledgments are also due to the proprietors of " Harpers' Magazine," "Harpers' Weekly Journal," and the "Atlantic Monthly" magazine, for permission to make selections from their pages; and to those useful collections, Mr. Frank Moore's "Rebellion Record," and Littell's " Living Age," I am also indebted. Many of the compositions of those owned by their authors as well as of those which have remained anonymous I have been unable to trace to papers in which they first appeared.

R. G. W.