Nothing more could be done. The ram was badly damaged, and there was no help for her save to put back to the port whence she had come. Twice afterward she came out, but neither time did she come near enough to the Monitor to attack her, and the latter could not move off where she would cease to protect the wooden vessels. The ram was ultimately blown up by the Confederates on the advance of the Union army. Tactically, the fight was a drawn battleneither ship being able to damage the other, and both ships being fought to a standstill; but the moral and material effects were wholly in favor of the Monitor. Her victory was hailed with exultant joy throughout the whole Union, and exercised a correspondingly depressing effect in the Confederacy; while every naval man throughout the world, who possessed eyes to see, saw that the fight in Hampton Roads had inaugurated a new era in ocean warfare, and that the Monitor and Merrimac, which had waged so gallant and so terrible a battle, were the first ships of the new era, and that as such their names would be forever famous. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on. I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never beat retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat; Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. -Julia Ward Howe. IN THE FLAG-BEARER N no war since the close of the great Napoleonic struggles has the fighting been so obstinate and bloody as in the Civil War. Much has been said in song and story of the resolute courage of the Guards at Inkerman, of the charge of the Light Brigade, and of the terrible fighting and loss of the German armies at Mars La Tour and Gravelotte. The praise bestowed upon the British and Germans for their valor, and for the loss that proved their valor, was well deserved; but there were over one hundred and twenty regiments, Union and Confederate, each of which, in some one battle of the Civil War, suffered a greater loss than any English regiment at Inkerman or at any other battle in the Crimea, a greater loss than was suffered by any German regiment at Gravelotte or at any other battle of the Franco-Prussian war. No European regiment in any recent struggle has suffered such losses as at Gettysburg befell the Ist Minnesota, when 82 per cent. of the officers |