Then brazen bugles rang the clarion call;
Arose as one twice twenty thousand men,
And all our hillsides blazed with crackling fire.
With sudden crash and simultaneous roar
An hundred cannon opened instantly,
And all the vast hills shuddered under us.
Yelling their mad defiance to our fire
Still on and upward came our daring foes.
As when upon the wooded mountain-side
The unchained Loki[D] riots and the winds
Of an autumnal tempest lash the flames,
Whirling the burning fragments through the air--
Huge blazing limbs and tops of blasted pines--
Mowing wide swaths with circling scythes of fire,
So fell our fire upon the advancing host,
And lashed their ranks and mowed them into heaps,
Cleaving broad avenues of death. Still on
And up they come undaunted, closing up
The ghastly gaps and firing as they come.
As if protected by the hand of heaven,
Rides at their head their gallant leader still;
The tempest drowns his voice--his naming sword
Gleams in the flash of rifles. One wild yell--Like
the mad hunger-howl of famished wolves
Midwinter on the flying cabris'[E] trail,
Swelled by ten thousand hideous voices, shrills,
And through the battle-smoke the bravest burst.
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