At one o’clock the first signal-gun was fired And the solid ground began to be sick anew. For two hours then that sickness, the unhushed roar Of two hundred and fifty cannon firing like one.

By Philadelphia, eighty-odd miles away, An old man stooped and put his ear to the ground And heard that roar, it is said, like the vague sea-clash In a hollow conch-shell, there, in his flowerbeds. He had planted trumpet-flowers for fifteen years But now the flowers were blowing an iron noise Through earth itself. He wiped his face on his sleeve And tottered back to his house with fear in his eyes.

The caissons began to blow up in the Union batteries.⁠ ⁠…