Ah, your song drowns in tears!  Yet you do not wish me to live, Lenore?  O love, I can do nothing but die!

The sunlight fades from the hills, the air wavers and glimmers, and day is dim.  Thy face is mistier than a vision of angels.  There are faint, strange voices in my ear, swift rustlings, far harmonics;—­has sense become so attenuated that I hear the blood in my failing pulses?  Lenore, love, lower.  Thy lips to mine, and breathe my life away.  Twice would I die to save thee!

—­Anselmo! man! where art thou?  Come back ere I fall,—­strength flares up like a dying flame. Never tell her why I betrayed Italy!

—­Closer, dear love, closer!  What old murmurs do I hear?

  “The night is spread for thee,
  The heavens are wide,
  And the dark earth’s mystery”—­

So,—­in thy arms,—­from thee to God!  O love, forever—­kiss—­forgive!—­Lift me, that I confront eternity and Christ!

AFTER “TAPS.”

  Tramp!  Tramp!  Tramp!  Tramp! 
  As I lay with my blanket on,
  By the dim fire-light, in the moonlit night,
  When the skirmishing fight was done.

  The measured beat of the sentry’s feet,
  With the jingling scabbard’s ring! 
  Tramp!  Tramp! in my meadow-camp
  By the Shenandoah’s spring.

  The moonlight seems to shed cold beams
  On a row of pale gravestones: 
  Give the bugle breath, and that image of Death
  Will fly from the reveille’s tones.

  By each tented roof, a charger’s hoof
  Makes the frosty hill-side ring: 
  Give the bugle breath, and a spirit of Death
  To each horse’s girth will spring.

  Tramp!  Tramp!  Tramp!  Tramp! 
  The sentry, before my tent,
  Guards, in gloom, his chief, for whom
  Its shelter to-night is lent.

  I am not there.  On the hill-side bare
  I think of the ghost within;
  Of the brave who died at my sword-hand side,
  To-day, ’mid the horrible din

  Of shot and shell and the infantry yell,
  As we charged with the sabre drawn. 
  To my heart I said, “Who shall be the dead
  In my tent, at another dawn?”

  I thought of a blossoming almond-tree,
  The stateliest tree that I know;
  Of a golden bowl; of a parted soul;
  And a lamp that is burning low.

  Oh, thoughts that kill!  I thought of the hill
  In the far-off Jura chain;
  Of the two, the three, o’er the wide salt sea,
  Whose hearts would break with pain;

  Of my pride and joy,—­my eldest boy;
  Of my darling, the second—­in years;
  Of Willie, whose face, with its pure, mild grace,
  Melts memory into tears;

  Of their mother, my bride, by the Alpine lake’s side,
  And the angel asleep in her arms;
  Love, Beauty, and Truth, which she brought to my youth,
  In that sweet April day of her charms.