Sounding the Wilderness.

_Like shoals of fish in spring
That visit Crusoe's isle,
The host in the lonesome place--
The hundred thousand file._

The foe that held his guarded hills
Must speed to woods afar;
For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth
With the slowly-smoked cigar--
The scheme that smouldered through winter long
Now bursts into act--into waw--
The resolute scheme of a heart as calm
As the Cyclone's core.

_The fight for the city is fought
In Nature's old domain;
Man goes out to the wilds,
And Orpheus' charm is vain._

In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,
Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat
And cuddled-up skeleton;
And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--
But the Year and the Man were gone.