INTRODUCTION
Mr. Randall was, at the time, a Professor of English Literature and Classics in Poydras College at Pointe Coupee, Louisiana. While he was, thus, engaged, poetry was with him a passion and he had often, in the hours of leisure indulged in the ecstasy of writing exquisite poetry.
Published in the last days of April, 1861, his war song fired the Southern heart.
It displays the warmth of youth with the valor of the soldier, and pleads with his mother State to vindicate her peerless chivalry. After the war, his deep religious devotion turned his heart in kindness to those, who had been on the other side in the fratricidal strife, and he wrote the beautiful poem “At Arlington.” A devoted friend of Colonel Randall thus described the circumstances under which that poem was written. In the hearts of some of his triumphant foes the gall of bitterness still lingered, and “on one Decoration Day,” so the story goes, “the graves of Federal soldiers at Arlington Cemetery were heaped with flowers, and some pious women strewed a few garlands on the nearby graves of some Confederate dead. Whereupon, some Northern men,
