Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/325

Peace 309 popular poem on both sides came to be C. C. Sawyer's When This Cruel War Is Over.^ The sentiment of the poem is echoed in poems on peace by George Herbert Sass, Ticknor, Bruns, and Timrod. Very different from the concluding lines of the Cotton Boll is Timrod's pathetic yearning for peace, in the poem entitled Christmas: Peace in the quiet dales, Made rankly fertile by the blood of men, Peace in the woodland, and the lonely glen, Peace, in the peopled vales! Peace on the whirring marts. Peace where the scholar thinks, the hunter roams, Peace, God of Peace ! peace, peace, in all our homes. And peace in all our hearts ! When peace came, the defeat of the South, its unconquer- able loyalty to the lost cause, and its sad resignation at the inevitable found expression in Mrs. Preston's Acceptation, Re- quier's Ashes of Glory, Flash's The Confederate Flag, and, above all, Father Ryan's The Sword of Robert Lee and The Conquered Banner. Not until the end of the war did the last-named poet suddenly flash forth as the most popular of aU Southern poets. The Conquered Banner was written under somewhat the same circumstance as My Maryland — written in less than an hour as he brooded over the thought of the dead soldiers and the lost cause. He wrote other poems, chiefly religious, but none that has ever stirred the hearts of the people like these two written in the shadow of defeat. Somewhat different in tone and spirit is The Land Where We Were Dreaming, by Daniel B. Lucas. Written and first printed in Montreal, whither the author had fled at the end of the war, it is a striking expression of a Southerner's awakening from the illusions which had so long dominated the thought of the people. There is the same loyalty to the leaders and the principles of the South, but a glimpse of reality that augured a readjustment for the future. Two years after the war, Timrod, suffering from tubercu- losis and the direst poverty, wrote his greatest poem, the Ode ' See Book III, Chap. ii.