WAITING.
Drop, falling fruits and crispèd leaves!
Ye tone a note of joy to me;
Through the rough wind my soul sails free,
nigh over waves that Autumn heaves.
Such quickening is in Nature's death,
Such life in every dying day,—
The glowing year hath lost her sway,
Since Freedom waits her parting breath.
I watch the crimson maple-boughs,
I know by heart each burning leaf,
Yet would that like a barren reef
Stripped to the breeze those arms uprose!
Under the flowers my soldier lies!
But come, thou chilling pall of snow,
Lest he should hear who sleeps below
The yet unended captive cries!
Fade swiftly, then, thou lingering year!
Test with the storms our eager powers;
For chains are broken with the hours,
And Freedom walks upon thy bier.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Eyes and Ears. By HENRY WARD BEECHER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, pp. 419.
There is perhaps no man in America more widely known, more deeply loved, and more heartily hated than the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. This little book, fragmentary and desultory as it is, gives us a key wherewith to unlock the mystery both of the extent of his influence and the depth of the feelings which he excites. It is but a shower of petals flung down by a frolicsome May breeze; but the beauty and brilliancy of their careless profusion furnish a hint of the real strength and substance and fruitfulness of the tree from which they sprang.
Within the compass of some four hundred pages we have about one hundred articles, most of which had previously appeared in weekly newspapers. They embrace, of course, every variety of subject,—grave and gay, practical and poetical. They are not such themes as come to a man in silence and solitude, to be wrought out with deep and deliberate conscientiousness; they are rather such as He around one in his outgoing and his incoming, in the field and by the way-side, overlooked by the preoccupied multitude, but abundantly patent to the few who will not permit the memories or the hopes of life to thrust away its actualities, and, once pointed out, full of interest and amusement even to the absorbed and hitherto unconscious throngs. We have here no pale-browed, far-sighted philosopher, but a ruddy-faced, high-spirited man, cheerful-tempered, yet not equilibrious, susceptible to annoyance, capable of wrathful outbursts, with eyes to see all sweet sights, ears to hear all sweet sounds, and lips to sing their loveliness to others, and also with eyes and ears and lips just as keen to distinguish and just as hold to denounce the sights and sounds that are unlovely;—and this man, with his ringing laugh and his springing step, walks cheerily to and fro in his daily work, striking the rocks here and there by the way-side with his bright steel hammer, eliciting a shower of sparks from each, and then on to the next. It is not the serious business of his life, but its casual and almost careless experiments. He does not wait to watch effects. You may gather up the brushwood and build yourself a fire, if you like. His part of the affair is but a touch and go,— partly for love and partly for fun.