" I SEE the champion sword-strokes flash;
I see them fall and hear them clash;
I hear the murderous engines crash;
I see a brother stoop to loose a foeman-brother's bloody sash.

" I see the torn and mangled corse,
The dead and dying heaped in scores,
The headless rider by his horse,
The wounded captive bayoneted through and through without remorse.

" I hear the dying sufferer cry,
With his crushed face turned to the sky,
I see him crawl in agony
To the foul pool, and bow his head into its bloody slime and die.

" I see the assassin crouch and fire,
I see his victim fall — expire;
I see the murderer creeping nigher
To strip the dead: He turns the head: The face!
The son beholds his sire!

" I hear the curses and the thanks;
I see the mad charge on the flanks,
The rents — the gaps — the broken ranks, —
The vanquished squadrons driven headlong down the river's bridgeless banks.

" I see the death-gripe on the plain,
The grappling monsters on the main.
The tens of thousands that are slain,
And all the speechless suffering and agony of heart and brain.

" I see the dark and bloody spots,
The crowded rooms and crowded cots,
The bleaching bones, the battle-blots, —
And writ on many a nameless grave, a legend of forget-me-nots.

" I see the gorged prison-den,
The dead line and the pent-up pen,
The thousands quartered in the fen,
The living-deaths of skin and bone that were the goodly shapes of men.

" And still the bloody Dew must fall!
And His great Darkness with the Pall
Of His dread Judgment cover all,
Till the Dead Nation rise Transformed by Truth to triumph over all! "

" And LAST — AND LAST I SEE — The D EED . "

Thus saith the Keeper of the Key,
And the Great Seal of Destiny,
Whose Eye is the blue canopy,
And leaves the Pall of His great Darkness over all the Land and Sea.