Page 216 - The model orator, or, Young folks' speaker : containing the choicest recitations and readings from the best authors for schools, public entertainments, social gatherings, Sunday schools, etc. : including recitals in prose and verse ...

Wide sounding1 leagues of sentient steel, and fires that lived to kill.
Were but the echo of his voice, the body of Ins will.

But now iny heart is darkened with the shadows that rise and fall
Between the sunlight and the ground to sadden and appa.lL
The woeful things both seen and done we heeded little then,
But they return, like ghosts, to shake the sleep of aged men.

t
The German and the Englishman were each an open Ibe,
An open haired hurled us back from "Russ la's blinding snow;
In tenser far, in blood-roc! light, like fire:-; imquenched, remain
The dreadful deeds wrung forth by war from the brooding soul of Spain,

I saw a village in the hills, as silent as a dream,
Naught stirring but the summer sound of a merry mountain stream ;
The evening star just smiled from heaven with its quiet silver eve,
And the chestnut woods were still and calm beneath the deepening iky.

But in that place, self-sacrificed, nor man nor beast we found,
Nor fig-tree on the sun-touched slope, nor corn upon the ground ;
Each roofless hut was black with smoke, wrenched up each trailing vine,
Each path was foul with mangled meat and floods of wasted wine.

We had been marching, travel-worn, a long and burning way,
And when such welcoming we met, after that toilsome day,
The pulses in our maddened breasts were human hearts no more,
But, like the spirit of a wolf hot on the scent of gore.

We lighted on ore dying man, they slew him where he lay;
II is wife, close-clinging, front the corpse they tore and wrenched away;
They thundered in her widowed ears, with frowns and curses grim,
“ Food, woman— food and wine, or else wo tear thee limb from limb,"

The woman, shaking off his blood, rose, raven-haired and tall,
And our stern glances quailed before one sterner far than all.
"Both food and wine," she said, " T have; I meant them for the dead,
Rut yt arc living still, and so let them be yours instead.”