Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William McCarty, comp. The American National Song Book. 1842.

The Fields of War

Isaac McLellan (1806–1899)

The leaders of the war of the Revolution are seen, by Fancy’s eye, to take their stations on the mount of Remembrance. They come from the embattled cliffs of Abraham; they start from the heaving sods of Bunker Hill; they gather from the blazing lines of Saratoga and Yorktown—from the blood-dyed waters of the Brandywine, from the dreary snows of Valley-Forge, and all the hard-fought fields of the war.

EDWARD EVERETT.

THEY rise, by stream and yellow shore,

By mountain, moor, and fen;

By weedy rock and torrent hoar,

And lonesome forest-glen!

From many a woody, moss-grown mound,

Start forth a war-worn band,

As when, of old, they caught the sound

Of hostile arms, and closed around—

To guard their native land.

Hark! to the clanging horn—

Hark! to the rolling drum!

Arms glitter in the flash of morn—

The hosts to battle come!

The serried files, the plumed troop,

Are marshall’d once again,

Along the Hudson’s mountain-group,

Along the Atlantic main!

On Bunker, at the dead of night,

I seem to view the raging fight,

The burning town, the smoky height,

The onset, the retreat!

And, down the banks of Brandywine,

I see the levell’d bayonets shine

And lurid clouds of battle twine,

Where struggling columns meet.

Yorktown and Trenton blaze once more,

And by the Delaware’s frozen shore

The hostile guns at midnight roar,

The hostile shouts arise;

The snows of Valley-Forge grow red,

And Saratoga’s field is spread

With heaps of undistinguish’d dead,

And fill’d with dying cries!

’Tis o’er; the battle-shout has died

By ocean, stream, and mountain-side:

And the bright harvest, far and wide,

Waves o’er the blood-drench’d field;

The rank grass o’er it greenly grows—

And oft the upturning shares disclose

The buried arms and bones of those

Who fell, but would not yield!

Time’s rolling chariot hath effaced

The very hillocks, where were placed

The bodies of the dead in haste,

When closed the furious fight;

The ancient fort and rampart-mound

Long since have settled to the ground,

On Bunker’s famous height—

And the last relics of the brave

Are sinking to oblivion’s grave!