AMERICA TO-DAY
"Resting together side by side,
Comrades in blue and grey!
"Healed in the tender peace of time,
The wounds that once were red
With hatred and with hostile rage,
While sanguined brothers bled.
"They leaped together at the call
Of country one in one,
The soldiers of the Northern hills
And of the Southern sun !
"'Yankee' and 'Rebel,' side by side,
Beneath one starry fold
To-day, amid our common tears,
Their funeral bells are tolled."
The artlessness of these verses renders them none the less significant. They express a popular sentiment in popular language. But, as here expressed, it is clearly the sentiment of the North: how far is it shared and acknowledged by the South? Happening to be on the spot, I could not but try to obtain some sort of answer to this question.
Again, as I stood on the terrace of the Capitol that April afternoon, and looked out across the Potomac to the old Lee mansion at Arlington, while all the flags of Washington drooped at half-mast, a very different piece of verse somehow floated into my memory:
"Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor,
For 'alf o' Creation she owns:
We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword and the flame,
And salted it down with our bones.
(Poor beggars!—it's blue with our bones!)"
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