The grandest songs depart,
While the gentle, humble, and low-toned rhymes
Will echo from heart to heart.

ABRAM JOSEPH RYAN.

* * * * *

SENTINEL SONGS.

When falls the soldier brave
Dead--at the feet of wrong,--
The poet sings, and guards his grave
With sentinels of song.

Songs, march! he gives command,
Keep faithful watch and true;
The living and dead of the Conquered Land
Have now no guards save you.

Grave Ballads! mark ye well!
Thrice holy is your trust!
Go! halt! by the fields where warriors fell,
Rest arms! and guard their dust.

List, Songs! your watch is long!
The soldiers' guard was brief,
Whilst right is right, and wrong is wrong,
Ye may not seek relief.

Go! wearing the gray of grief!
Go! watch o'er the Dead in Gray!
Go guard the private and guard the chief,
And sentinel their clay!

And the songs, in stately rhyme,
And with softly sounding tread,
Go forth, to watch for a time--a time,
Where sleep the Deathless Dead.

And the songs, like funeral dirge,
In music soft and low,
Sing round the graves,--whilst not tears surge
From hearts that are homes of woe.

What though no sculptured shaft
Immortalize each brave?
What though no monument epitaphed
Be built above each grave?

When marble wears away,
And monuments are dust,--
The songs that guard our soldiers' clay
Will still fulfil their trust.

With lifted head, and steady tread,
Like stars that guard the skies,
Go watch each bed, where rest the dead,
Brave Songs! with sleepless eyes.

ABRAM JOSEPH RYAN.

* * * * *

ODE.

[Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate
dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C.]

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,--
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause,

In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Then when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, a