poetry of Bryant. Like Webster, our poet always selected the leading, impressive thought, and brushed the rest aside. This he put in with a firm and glowing touch. Many have thought the works of both the statesman and the poet conventional, but the adjective might be brought to apply to all simple and essential truth and diction. Adopting Arnold's distinction, we see that Bryant's simplicity was not simplesse, but simplicité. Everett made a good presentation of its strongest claim when he said that poetry, at its best, is "easily intelligible, touching the finest chords of taste and feeling, but never striving at effect. This is the highest merit in every department of literature, and in poetry it is well called inspiration. Surprise, conceit, strange combinations of imagery and expression, may be successfully managed, but it is merit of an inferior kind. The beautiful, pathetic, and sublime are always simple and natural, and marked by a certain serene unconsciousness of effort." "This," he added, "is the character of Mr. Bryant's poetry."

Bryant's favorite

measures.

The iam

bic quatrain.

V.

LET us again, then, observe its forms and themes, and discover clues to the quality of the genius which idealized them. Bryant's chosen measures were few and simple. Two were special favorites, most frequently used for his pictures of nature and his meditations on the soul of things, and in their use he was

a master.

One was the iambic quatrain, in octosyllabic verse, of which the familiar stanza, "Truth crushed to earth will rise again," may be recalled as a specimen. Many of his best modern pieces are composed in this measure, so evenly and firmly that the slightest change

HIS BLANK-VERSE.

would mar their sound and flow. "A Day Dream," written in the poet's old age, is perfect of its kind, and may rank almost with Collins's nonpareil, "To fair Fidele's Grassy Tomb." Witness such stanzas as these:

I sat and watched the eternal flow

Of those smooth billows toward the shore,
While quivering lines of light below

Ran with them on the ocean floor."

"Then moved their coral lips; a strain
Low, sweet and sorrowful, I heard,
As if the murmurs of the main

Were shaped to syllable and word."

His variations upon the iambic quatrain, as in the

celebrated poems,

verse.

79

"To a Waterfowl " and "The Past," are equally successful. The second of the forms re- His blankferred to is that blank-verse in which his supremacy always was recognized. Among the distinct phases of our grandest English measure that have been observed in literature, Bryant's may be classed with the Reflective, of which Wordsworth, succeeding the didacticians, held unquestioned control, but from the outset it was marked by a quality plainly his own. The essence of its cadence, pauses, rhythm, should be termed American, and it is the best ever written in the New World. Blank-verse is the easiest and the most difficult of all measures; the poorest in poor hands; the finest when written by a true poet. Whoever essays it is a poet disrobed; he must rely upon his natural gifts; his defects cannot be hidden. In this measure Bryant was at his height, and he owes to it the most enduring portion of his fame. However narrow his range, we must own that he was first in the first. He reached the upper air at once in "Thanatopsis," and again and again, though none too frequently, he

А рапоramic series.

Lofty contemplative poems.

renewed his flights, and, like his own waterfowl, pursued his "solitary way."

The finest and most sustained of his poems of nature are those written in blank-verse. At intervals so rare throughout his life as to resemble the seven-year harvests, or the occasional wave that overtops the rest, he composed a series of those pieces which now form a unique panorama of nature's aspects, moving to the music of lofty thoughts and melodious words. Such are "A Winter Piece," the "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," "A Forest Hymn," "Summer Wind," "The Prairies," "The Fountain," "A Hymn of the Sea," "A Rain-Dream"; also a few written late in life, showing that the eye of the author of "Thanatopsis" had not been dimmed, nor was his natural force abated: these are "The Constellations," "The River, by Night," and "Among the Trees." In all the treatment is large and ennobling, and distinctly marks each as Bryant's. The method, that of invocation, somewhat resembles the manner of Coleridge's Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni. When in a less enraptured strain, they exhibit repose, feeling, wise and reverent thought.

In the same eloquent verse, and with like cæsural pauses and inflections, we find his more purely meditative poems, upon an equal or still higher plane of feeling, "Thanatopsis," the "Hymn to Death," "Earth," "An Evening Revery," "The Antiquity of Freedom," and one of his latest and longest, "The Flood of Years." Yet, in both his reflective verse and that devoted to nature, he often employed lyrical measures with equal excellence; as in the breezy, exquisite poem on "Life," "The Battle Field," "The Future Life," and "The Conqueror's Grave," - the latter one of his most elevating pieces. Especially

AN ELEMENTAL IMAGINATION.

in his lyrics he seemed like a wind-harp yielding ten-
der music in response to every suggestion of the great
Mother whom he loved. Such poems as "June,"
"The Death of the Flowers," and "The Evening
Wind" show this, and also indicate the limits within
which his song was spontaneous.
Each is the gen-

uine expression of a personal mood, and has by this
merit taken its place in metrical literature.

the ele

ments.

81

At last, then, we are brought to a recognition of the A bard of power in Bryant's verse which has given him a station above that which he could hope to win by its amount or range. It is the elemental quality of his song. Like the bards of old, his spirit delights in fire, air, earth, and water, - the apparent structures of the starry heavens, the mountain recesses, and the vasty deep. These he apostrophizes, but over them and within them he discerns and bows the knee to the omniscience of a protecting Father, a creative God. Poets, eminent Imagina in this wise, have been gifted always with imagination. tion. The verse of Bryant often is full of high imaginings. Select any portion of "Thanatopsis " :—

"Pierce the Barcan wilderness,

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there!"

Fills the savannas with his murmurings,

And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,

Within the hollow oak. I listen long

To his domestic hum, and think I hear

The sound of that advancing multitude

Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice

Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn

His
"hand on
Nature's

keys."

Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark-brown furrows. All at once

A fresher wind sweeps by and breaks my dream,
And I am in the wilderness alone."

Read the entire poem of "Earth." Take such stan-
zas as this, from "The Past":

"Far in thy realm withdrawn

Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom,
And glorious ages gone

Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb"

such phrases as,

“Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste”;

;

or, from "A Rain-Dream," an impersonation of
"the Wind of night,

A lonely wanderer between earth and cloud,
In the black shadow and the chilly mist,
Along the streaming mountain-side, and through
The dripping woods, and o'er the plashy fields,
Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes
The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets
A welcome or a friend, and still goes on
In darkness."

-

Take passages like these, and they are not infre quent in Bryant's poetry, - make allowance for the law by which any real poet's work is sure to grow upon us in close examination, and we still are confronted with an "elemental" imagination often higher than that of more productive poets. Modern singers excel in richness of phrase, redundant imagery, elaborate word-painting; but every period has its forerunners and masters, and our rising men must acknowledge Bryant as a laurelled master of the early American School. He seldom touched the keys, yet they gave out an organ tone,