| The two poems which follow "The Raven Days" have not |
| been included in earlier editions. All three are calls |
| from those desperate years for the South just after the Civil War. |
| The reader of to-day, seeing that forlorn period |
| in the just perspective of half a century, will not wonder |
| at the tone of anguished remonstrance; but, rather, |
| that so few notes of mourning have come from a poet |
| who missed nothing of what the days of Reconstruction |
| brought to his people. |
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The Raven Days.



Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken,
And but the ghosts of homes to us remain,
And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token
From friend to friend of an unspoken pain.

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks
Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow,
Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks.

Ye float in dusky files, forever croaking.
Ye chill our manhood with your dreary shade.