August Thirty-First

My deep wound burns, my pale lips quake in death,

I feel my fainting heart resign its strife,
And reaching now the limit of my life.
Lord, to thy will I yield my parting breath,
Yet many a dream hath charmed my youthful
eye;

And must life's visions all depart?

Oh, surely no! for all that fired my heart
To rapture here shall live with me on high;
And that fair form that won my earliest vow,
That my young spirit prized all else above,
And now adored as Freedom, now as Love,
Stands in seraphic guise before me now;
And as my failing senses fade away

It beckons me on high, to realms of endless day.

[Sonnet composed by John Laurens as he lay dying of wounds and fever incurred in a campaign against the British in South Carolina.-Editor]

September

AUTUMN SONG

My Life is but a leaf upon the tree-
A growth upon the stem that feedeth all.
A touch of frost-and suddenly I fall,
To follow where my sister-blossoms be.

The selfsame sun, the shadow, and the rain

That brought the budding verdure to the bough, Shall strip the fading foliage as now, And leave the limb in nakedness again.

My life is but a leaf upon the tree;

The winds of birth and death upon it blow; But whence it came and whither it shall go, Is mystery of mysteries to me.

JOHN B. TABB

September First

Around me blight, where all before was bloom! And so much lost! alas! and nothing won; Save this that I can lean on wreck and tomb, And weep-and weeping pray-Thy will be ABRAM J. RYAN

done.

(The Prayer of the South)

General Hood evacuates Atlanta, 1864

September Second

Sixty thousand of us witnessed the destruction of Atlanta, while our post band and that of the Thirty-third Massachusetts played martial airs and operatic selections.

CAPT. DANIEL OAKEY, U. S. A.

Sherman enters Atlanta, 1864

September Third

On this point, however, all parties in the South were agreed, and the vast majority of the people of the North-before the war. The Abolitionist proper was considered not so much a friend of the negro as the enemy of society. As the war went on, and the Abolitionist saw the "glory of the Lord" revealed in a way he had never hoped for, he saw at the same time, or rather ought to have seen, that the order he had lived to destroy could not have been a system of hellish wrong and fiendish cruelty; else the prophetic vision of the liberators would have been fulfilled, and the horrors of San Domingo would have polluted this fair land. For the negro race does not deserve undivided praise for its conduct during the war. Let some small part of the credit be given to the masters, not all to the finer qualities of their "brothers in black." The school in which the training was given is closed, and who wishes to open it? Its methods were old-fashioned and were sadly behind the times, but the old schoolmasters turned out scholars who, in certain branches of moral philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates of the new university. BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE (On Slavery)