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Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  The Bugle

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

The Bugle

By Grenville Mellen (1799–1841)

[Born in Biddeford, Me., 1799. Died in New York, N. Y., 1841. The Martyr’s Triumph, Buried Valley, and Other Poems. 1883.]

O WILD enchanting horn!

Whose music up the deep and dewy air

Swells to the clouds, and calls on echo there,

Till a new melody is born;—

Wake, wake again! the night

Is bending from her throne of beauty down,

With still stars beaming on her azure crown,

Intense and eloquently bright.

Night, at its pulseless noon,

When the far voice of waters mourns in song,

And some tired watch-dog, lazily and long,

Barks at the melancholy moon.

Hark! how it sweeps away,

Soaring and dying on the silent sky,

As if some sprite of sound went wandering by,

With lone halloo and roundelay.

Swell, swell in glory out!

Thy tones come pouring on my leaping heart,

And my stirred spirit hears thee with a start

As boyhood’s old, remembered shout.

Oh, have ye heard that peal

From sleeping city’s moon-bathed battlements,

Or from the guarded field and warrior tents,

Like some near breath around you steal?

Or have ye, in the roar

Of sea, or storm, or battle, heard it rise,

Shriller than eagle’s clamor, to the skies,

Where wings and tempests never soar?

Go, go! no other sound,

No music that of air or earth is born,

Can match the mighty music of that horn,

On midnight’s fathomless profound.

END OF VOL. V.