Classic Poem

And ever as Lee rode there marched beside,
His battle comrades, close imaginings
Of soldier-laden past, though scattered far,
Yet his, his gray beloveds, conquerors
Of time and space by love inviolate,
The incorruptible defying death,
The victory that follows up defeat.
And all the red and turbulent fields of war,
The smoke, the serried ranks, the rush and surge
Of men and horses, flashing swords high-swung,
The lines of belching guns, wide sheets of flame,
And carnage swaths blood-spattered, corse-bestrewn —
These passed a mystic circle round about.
He saw each arc completed in the whole —
His soul's circumference of memories —
The girth become a chain of oracles
Unfolded to the perfect will of God.
And all his thoughts ascended worshipping.

Beauty was Nature's priest and celebrant.
Amid her myriad shrines remembrances
Took on a skyey saneness, and he saw
Heaven's pinnacles to all the roads of life
And the wide landscape of Love's purposes.
As roamed he meditation's mystic paths
The Mighty Captain found a daily cheer —
Sweet wells of promise, streams of living hope,
Whose virtues were the soothing of the spirit.
Blessed are they that find them and drink deeply.

So found he and so drank he as he rode.
And like twain angels greeting saints of eld
In the far days of symbol and of dream,
There daily passed before him on the hills
The New South with her pageantry of morn
After the night, and his unfolding Mission
Beside her with a wonderment of gaze,
As lithe hands smote the clouds before her goings.