Of tramp and hoof and wheel, and guns that bruise the ground.

3

--Sudden, the mist gathers up like a curtain, the theatre clear;
Stage of unequal conflict, and triumph purchased too dear!
Half our boot treasures of gallanthood there, with axe and with glaive,
One against ten,--what of that?--We are ready for glory or grave!
There, Spain and her thousands nearing, with lightning-tongued weapons of
war;--
Ebro's swarthy sons, and the bands from Epirus afar;
Crescia, Gonzaga, del Vasto,--world-famous names of affright,
Veterans of iron and blood, insatiate engines of fight:--
But ours were Norris and Essex and Stanley and Willoughby grim,
And the waning Dudley star, and the star that will never be dim,
Star of Philip the peerless,--and now at height of his noon,
Astrophel!--not for thyself but for England extinguish'd too soon!

4

Red walls of Zutphen behind; before them, Spain in her might:--
O! 'tis not war, but a game of heroic boyish delight!
For on, like a bolt-head of steel, go the fifty, dividing their way,
Through and over the brown mail-shirts,--Farnese's choicest array;
Over and through, and the curtel-axe flashes, the plumes in their pride
Sink like the larch to the hewer, a death-mown avenue wide:
While the foe in his stubbornness flanks them and bars them, with
merciless aim
Shooting from musket and saker a scornful death-tongue of flame.
As in an autumn afar, the Six Hundred in Chersonese hew'd