Classic Poem

A drummer-boy from fair Bayonne
By love of glory lured,
With bold Macdonald's stern array
The pains of war endured.
And now amid those dizzy heights
That girt the Splugen dread,
The silent columns struggled on,
And he marched at their head.

Then in those regions cold and dim,
With endless winter cursed,
The Alpine storm arose and scowled
And forth in fury burst—
Burst forth on the devoted ranks,
Ambition's dauntless brood,
That thus with sword and lance profaned
Old Winter's solitude.

“Down! down! upon your faces fall;
Cling to the guns! for, lo,
The chamois on this slippery track
Would dread yon gulf below!”
So speed the word from front to rear,
And veterans to the storm
Bowed low, who ne'er in battle bowed
To aught in foeman's form.

But hark! what horror swells the gale—
Beware, oh sons of France!
Beware the avalanche whose home
Is 'mid these mountain haunts.
Yon distant thunder—'t is its voice!
The bravest held his breath,
And silently a prayer put up
To die a soldier's death.

And near and nearer with a roar
That loud and louder swelled,
The avalanche down glaciers broad
Its lightning pathway held;
And through the shivering ranks it crashed,
And then with one vast stride
Swept down the gulf, till far below
Its muttering thunders died.

In vain Italia's sunny plains
And reeling vines invite;
Full many a soldier found his shroud
'Mid Alpine snows that night;
And he, his comrades' pride and boast,
The lad from fair Bayonne?
The roll was called, no voice replied,—
The drummer-boy was gone.

Gone! gone! but hark, from the abyss,
What sounds so faintly come,
Amid the pauses of the storm?
It is—it is—the drum!
He lives, he beats for aid, he sounds
The old familiar call,
That to the battery's smoking throat
Had brought his comrades all.

Over the dizzy verge that eve
With straining eyes they peered,
And heard the rattling of the drum,
In echoes strange and weird;
The notes would cease, and then again
Would sound—again to fail,
Until no more their fainting moan
Came wafted on the gale

And when red Wagram's fight was fought,
And the big war was o'er,
A dark-haired matron in Bayonne
Stood watching by her door;
Stood watching, praying many an hour,
Till hair and heart grew gray,
For the bright-eyed boy who, 'mid the Alps,
Was sleeping far away.

And still, belated peasants tell
How, near that Alpine height,
They hear the drum-roll loud and clear
On many a storm-vexed night.
This story of the olden time
With sad eyes they repeat,
And whisper by whose ghostly hands
The spirit-drum is beat