William McCarty, comp. The American National Song Book. 1842.
A Souvenir of Fort MimmsCharles L. S. Jones
O,
With a dubious and shadowy gleaming,
Where the ramparts of Mimms rose stilly on the sight,
And the star-spangled banner was streaming.
Came, fraught with its tidings of sorrow;
Nor foreboding vision upheld the veil that screen’d
From their eyes the dread dawn of the morrow.
Its tenants, their revelries keeping,
Deem’d the red savage foemen distant far, at rest,
In their wilds, round their watch-fires, were sleeping.
No sound broke the hour’s riot madness;
Their songs, soft, return’d from the forest’s sombre gloom,
Which moved Echo repeated in sadness.
Rose, clad in its dew-tinted brightness;
And its silvery rays on the leafy boughs the dawn
Threw aslant, with its quivery lightness.
And scarcely the wind’s circulation
Moves gently, as, rising, the wooing breezes play
Through their branches, in soft undulation.
And far every fearful intrusion;
Till the war-hatchet swift o’er their fated fortress gleam’d,
Midst despair, havoc, death, and confusion:
With the rifle’s dread dissonance blending,
Mark’d destruction’s fell agents, of scowling aspect, near,
And their fate on the contest depending.
(Though despair fill’d its access, and breasted
The shock of the foeman, that, like a mountain wave,
Pour’d its force where Hope lingering rested)
Or the effort that fain would oppose them;
For the death-angel gloom’d o’er the struggle of the hour,
Leaving naught but the slain there to close them.
O, direful the groans of the shrinking;
Where the red, forky flames o’er that captive fortress play,
Where, in horror, those victims are sinking!
Where the mother shrieks loud, as she presses
Her babe, and defends, from the bayonet and the knife,
Its form, in her dying caresses!
Thou ill-starr’d memento of horror:
And the tear-gush of pity the anguish’d eye shall swell
O’er this end of thy wo and thy sorrow!