Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/232

 216 Divines and Moralists, 1783-1860 course, would well nigh go crazy." Through many of these pieces there breathes a frank sensuous enjoyment of physical beauty, which passes easily into religious exaltation. Beecher revels in the form and colour of great painting, and in the sounds, sights, and colours of landscape; the pictures in the Louvre and the glories of a sunset are to him literally revela- tions. These volumes testify once more to the richness of his mental imagery, and to its decided growth in range and in culture after his removal to the East. Meanwhile, during all the years from his first pulpit to the beginning of the Civil War, his opposition to slavery had been deepening. He never joined the Abolitionists, but untiringly opposed the extension of slavery, and during the decade from 1850 to i860, in lectures and in contributions to periodicals, denounced the various compromises and outrages that led up to the conflict. Freedom and War (1863), a volume of spirited sermons and addresses from the Brooklyn pulpit, exhibits the growth of his opinions up to the moment when he began to advocate immediate abolition — a moment just before the Emancipation Proclamation itself. In educating public opinion upon slavery, Beecher had been imconsciously preparing his own armament for uses which he could not have guessed. While upon a vacation in England in ^the autumn of 1863 he was asked to speak on the war, and in the course of eleven days delivered almost im- promptu, at Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London, the series of addresses which gave him perhaps his greatest celebrity. Some of his audiences, notably those at Liverpool and Glasgow, were most tumultuous, and had actually to be conquered by the speaker. He conquered them, and won over the English middle class to sympathy with the Union cause. The determination of the British government to maintain strict neutrality is said to have been largely due to Beecher's effect upon public opinion. As literature, the addresses in England, though of course they bear the marks of their hasty composition and contested delivery, yet reveal the easy mastery of his material which Beecher had been storing up in his years of preparatory writing and speaking. Their lucidity and humour are still delightful; they still throw off visibly the live sparks that were struck out in the original clash