Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters and towards the western sun!  Let the joyous light shine in upon the pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side of honor and of duty.  Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his aches and weariness.  So comes down another night over this household, unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings,—­a night of peaceful rest and grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.

WAITING.

Drop, falling fruits and crisped 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