Chica and I would like you to join us for a few moments of reflection today. As a nation, we can never forget the fateful events of September 11th. The sadness that enveloped all of us and the courage that was displayed by so many makes the memory so vivid. I changed that day and I wasn’t alone, the entire world changed with me. Please feel free to take a moment and share a few thoughts with everyone in the comments.

We’d like to share with you a little history behind one of our favorite patriotic pieces, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

“Of the writing of the lyrics, Julia Ward Howe remembers, ‘I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.’” ^*

It was first published on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly on February 1862. The sixth verse written by Howe, was not published at that time.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

* Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences: 1819-1899.Houghton, Mifflin: New York, 1899. p. 275.