you stick to the flag! But to sailors o' the South that easy way was barred. To some, dame, believe (and I speak o' what I know), Wormwood the trial and the Uzzite's black shard; And the faithfuller the heart, the crueller the throe. Duty? It pulled with more than one string, This way and that, and anyhow a sting. The flag and your kin, how be true unto both? If either plight ye keep, then ye break the other troth. But elect here they must, though the casuists were out; Decide—hurry up—and throttle every doubt. Of all these thrills thrilled at keelson, and throes, Little felt the shoddyites a-toasting o' their toes; In mart and bazar Lucre chuckled the huzza, Coining the dollars in the bloody mint of war. But in men, gray knights o' the Order o' Scars, And brave boys bound by vows unto Mars, Nature grappled honor, intertwisting in the strife:— But some cut the knot with a thoroughgoing knife. For how when the drums beat? How in the fray In Hampton Roads on the fine balmy day? There a lull, wife, befell—drop o' silent in the din. Let us enter that silence ere the belchings re-begin. Through a ragged rift aslant in the cannonade's smoke An iron-clad reveals her repellent broadside Bodily intact. But a frigate, all oak, Shows honeycombed by shot, and her deck crimson-dyed. And a trumpet from port of the iron-clad hails, Summoning the other, whose flag never trails: "Surrender that frigate, Will! Surrender, Or I will sink her—ram, and end her!" 'T was Hal. And Will, from the naked heart-o'-oak, Will, the old messmate, minus trumpet, spoke, Informally intrepid—"Sink her, and be damned!"* [* Historic.] Enough. Gathering way, the iron-clad rammed. The frigate, heeling over, on the wave threw a dusk. Not sharing in the slant, the clapper of her bell The fixed metal struck—uinvoked struck the knell Of the Cumberland stillettoed by the Merrimac's tusk; While, broken in the wound underneath the gun-deck, Like a sword-fish's blade in leviathan waylaid, The tusk was left infixed in the fast-foundering wreck. There, dungeoned in the cockpit, the wounded go down, And the chaplain with them. But the surges uplift The prone dead from deck, and for moment they drift Washed with the swimmers, and the spent swimmers drown. Nine fathom did she sink—erect, though hid from light Save her colors unsurrendered and spars that kept the height. Nay, pardon, old aunty! Wife, never let it fall, That big started tear that hovers on the brim; I forgot about your nephew and the Merrimac's ball; No more then of her, since it summons up him. But talk o' fellows' hearts in the wine's genial cup:— Trap them in the fate, jam them in the strait, Guns speak their hearts then, and speak right up. The troublous colic o' intestine war It sets the bowels o' affection ajar. But, lord, old dame, so spins the whizzing world, A humming-top, ay, for the little boy-gods Flogging it well with their smart little rods, Tittering at time and the coil uncurled. Now, now, sweetheart, you sidle away, No, never you like that kind o' gay; But sour if I get, giving truth her due, Honey-sweet forever, wife, will Dick be to you! But avast with the War! 'Why recall racking days Since set up anew are the slip's started stays? Nor less, though the gale we have left behind, Well may the heave o' the sea remind. It irks me now, as it troubled me then, To think o' the fate in the madness o' men. If Dick was with Farragut on the night-river, When the boom-chain we burst in the fire-raft's glare, That blood-dyed the visage as red as the liver; In the Battle for the Bay too if Dick had a share, And saw one aloft a-piloting the war— Trumpet in the whirlwind, a Providence in place— Our Admiral old whom the captains huzza, Dick joys in the man nor brags about the race. But better, wife, I like to booze on the days Ere the Old Order foundered in these very frays, And tradition was lost and we learned strange ways. Often I think on the brave cruises then; Re-sailing them in memory, I hail the press o' men On the gunned promenade where rolling they go, Ere the dog-watch expire and break up the show. The Laced Caps I see between forward guns; Away from the powder-room they puff the cigar; "Three days more, hey, the donnas and the dons!" "Your Zeres widow, will you hunt her up, Starr?" The Laced Caps laugh, and the bright waves too; Very jolly, very wicked, both sea and crew, Nor heaven looks sour on either, I guess, Nor Pecksniff he bosses the gods' high mess. Wistful ye peer, wife, concerned for my head, And how best to get me betimes to my bed. But king o' the club, the gayest golden spark, Sailor o' sailors, what sailor do I mark? Tom Tight, Tom Tight, no fine fellow finer, A cutwater nose, ay, a spirited soul; But, bowsing away at the well-brewed bowl, He never bowled back from that last voyage to China. Tom was lieutenant in the brig-o'-war famed When an officer was hung for an arch-mutineer, But a mystery cleaved, and the captain was blamed, And a rumpus too raised, though his honor it was clear. And Tom he would say, when the mousers would try him, And with cup after cup o' Burgundy ply him: "Gentlemen, in vain with your wassail you beset, For the more I tipple, the tighter do I get." No blabber, no, not even with the can— True to himself and loyal to his clan. Tom blessed us starboard and d—d us larboard, Right down from rail to the streak o' the garboard. Nor less, wife, we liked him.—Tom was a man In contrast queer with Chaplain Le Fan, Who blessed us at morn, and at night yet again, D—ning us only in decorous strain; Preaching 'tween the guns—each cutlass in its place— From text that averred old Adam a hard case. I see him—Tom—on horse-block standing, Trumpet at mouth, thrown up all amain, An elephant's bugle, vociferous demanding Of topmen aloft in the hurricane of rain, "Letting that sail there your faces flog? Manhandle it, men, and you'll get the good grog!" O Tom, but he knew a blue-jacket's ways, And how a lieutenant may genially haze; Only a sailor sailors heartily praise. Wife, where be all these chaps, I wonder? Trumpets in the tempest, terrors in the fray, Boomed their commands along the deck like thunder; But silent is the sod, and thunder dies away. But Captain Turret, "Old Hemlock" tall, (A leaning tower when his tank brimmed all,) Manoeuvre out alive from the war did he? Or, too old for that, drift under the lee? Kentuckian colossal, who, touching at Madeira, The huge puncheon shipped o' prime Santa-Clara; Then rocked along the deck so solemnly! No whit the less though judicious was enough In dealing with the Finn who made the great huff; Our three-decker's giant, a grand boatswain's mate, Manliest of men in his own natural senses; But driven stark mad by the devil's drugged stuff, Storming all aboard from his run-ashore late, Challenging to battle, vouchsafing no pretenses, A reeling King Ogg, delirious in power, The quarter-deck carronades he seemed to make cower. "Put him in brig there!" said Lieutenant Marrot. "Put him in brig!" back he mocked like a parrot; "Try it, then!" swaying a fist like Thor's sledge, And making the pigmy constables hedge— Ship's corporals and the master-at-arms. "In brig there, I say!"—They dally no more; Like hounds let slip on a desperate boar, Together they pounce on the formidable Finn, Pinion and cripple and hustle him in. Anon, under sentry, between twin guns, He slides off in drowse, and the long night runs. Morning brings a summons. Whistling it calls, Shrilled through the pipes of the boatswain's four aids; Trilled down the hatchways along the dusk halls: Muster to the Scourge!—Dawn of doom and its blast! As from cemeteries raised, sailors swarm before the mast, Tumbling up the ladders from the ship's nether shades. Keeping in the background and taking small part, Lounging at their ease, indifferent in face, Behold the trim marines uncompromised in heart; Their Major, buttoned up, near the staff finds room— The staff o' lieutenants standing grouped in their place. All the Laced Caps o' the ward-room come, The Chaplain among them, disciplined and dumb. The blue-nosed boatswain, complexioned like slag, Like a blue Monday lours—his implements in bag. Executioners, his aids, a couple by him stand, At a nod there the thongs to receive from his hand. Never venturing a caveat whatever may betide, Though functionally here on humanity's side, The grave Surgeon shows, like the formal physician Attending the rack o' the Spanish Inquisition. The angel o' the "brig" brings his prisoner up; Then, steadied by his old Santa-Clara, a sup, Heading all erect, the ranged assizes there, Lo, Captain Turret, and under starred bunting, (A florid full face and fine silvered hair,) Gigantic the yet greater giant confronting. Now the culprit he liked, as a tall captain can A Titan subordinate and true sailor-man; And frequent he'd shown it—no worded advance, But flattering the Finn with a well-timed glance. But what of that now? In the martinet-mien Read the Articles of War, heed the naval routine; While, cut to the heart a dishonor there to win, Restored to his senses, stood the Anak Finn; In racked self-control the squeezed tears peeping, Scalding the eye with repressed inkeeping. Discipline must be; the scourge is deemed due. But ah for the sickening and strange heart- benumbing, Compassionate abasement in shipmates that view; Such a grand champion shamed there succumbing! "Brown, tie him up."—The cord he brooked: How else?—his
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