dying, through all:
We have need of the support--the staff and the rod;--
Beloved! we'll lean on the bosom of God!

"You guess what I fain would keep hidden:--you know,
Ere now, that the trail of the insolent foe
Leaves ruin behind it, disastrous and dire,
And burns through our Valley, a pathway of fire.
--Our beautiful home,--as I write it, I weep,
Our beautiful home is a smouldering heap!
And blackened, and blasted, and grim, and forlorn,
Its chimneys stand stark in the mists of the morn!

"I stood in my womanly helplessness, weak--
Though I felt a brave color was kindling my cheek--
And I plead by the sacredest things of their lives--
By the love that they bore to their children,--their wives,
By the homes left behind them, whose joys they had shared,
By the God that should judge them,--that mine should be spared.

"As well might I plead with the whirlwind to stay
As it crashingly cuts through the forest its way!
I know that my eye flashed a passionate ire,
As they scornfully flung me their answer of--fire!

"Why harrow your heart with the grief and the pain?
Why paint you the picture that's scorching my brain?
Why speak of the night when I stood on the lawn,
And watched the last flame die away in the dawn?
'Tis over,--that vision of terror,--of woe!
Its horrors I would not recall;--let them go!
I am calm when I think what I suffered them for;
I grudge not the quota _I_ pay to the war!

"But, Douglass!--deep down in the core of my heart,
There's a throbbing, an aching, that will not depart;
For memory mourns, with a wail of despair,
The loss of her treasures,--the subtle, the rare,
Precious things over which she delighted to pore,
Which nothing,--ah! nothing, can ever restore!

"The rose-covered porch, where I sat as your bride--
The hearth, where at twilight I leaned at your side--
The low-cushioned window-seat, where I would lie,
With my head on your knee, and look out on the sky:--
The chamber all holy with love and with prayer,
The motherhood memories clustering there--
The vines that _your_ hand has delighted to train,
The trees that _you_ planted;--Oh! never again
Can love build us up such a bower of bliss;
Oh! never can home be as hallow'd as this!

"Thank God! there's a dwelling not builded with hands,
Whose pear