A little door is hid in the boughs, A face is hiding within; When birds are silent and oxen drowse, Why should a maiden spin? Slower and slower turns the wheel, The face turns red and pale, Brighter and brighter the looks that steal Along the path to the vale. Here and everywhere how few are the adjectives, and never any slipped in as mere adjectives. Verbs and nouns do duty for them, and the pictures paint themselves. There is more of genius, art, thought, and study in this self-restraining simplicity than in the freer and bolder eloquence that might make young pulses tingle. This remarkable faculty for musical verse seems to us to enhance the merit of a poem in which a certain ruggedness is introduced of set purpose. At least, we think that the subtle sympathy, which in the workmanship of a true poet links theme and metre together, is curiously exemplified in "News to Tell." What metre is it? A very slight change here and there would conform it to the sober, solemn measure familiar to the least poetical of us in Gray's marvellous "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." That elegiac tone already suits the rhythm here to the pathetic story. But then the wounded soldier, who, perhaps, will not recover after all, but may follow his dead comrade--see how he drags himself with difficulty away from the old gray castle where the young widow and the aged mother are overwhelmed by the news he had to tell; and is not all this with exquisite cunning represented by the halting gait of the metre, in which every line deviates just a little from the normal scheme of five iambics? Neighbor, lend me your arm, for I am not well, This wound you see is scarcely a fortnight old, All for a sorry message I had to tell, I've travelled many a mile in wet and cold. Yon is the old gray château above the road, He bade me seek it, my comrade brave and gay; Stately forest and river so brown and broad, He showed me the scene as he a-dying lay. I have been there, and, neighbor I am not well; I bore his sword and some of his curling hair, Knocked at the gate and said I had news to tell, Entered a chamber and saw his mother there. Tall and straight with the snows of age on her head, Brave and stern as a soldier's mother might be, Deep in her eyes a living look of the dead, She grasped her staff and silently gazed at me. I thought I'd better be dead than meet her eye; She guessed it all, I'd never a word to tell. Taking the sword in her arms she heaved a sigh, Clasping the curl in her hand, she sobbed and fell. I raised her up; she sate in her stately chair, Her face like death, but not a tear in her eye. We heard a step, a tender voice on the stair Murmuring soft to an infant's cooing cry.