his well-known rendering of Homer-will much alter the impression produced by his early volume. The lifelong evenness of his work seems to justify reference at this point to what he wrote about poetry many years later. In 1871, as editor of a Library of Poetry and Song, he stated at considerable length what he conceived to be the most His Theory important qualities of lasting poetry. "The best poetry," he says, "that which takes the strongest hold on the general mind, not in one age only but in all ages,—is that which is always simple and always luminous."

of Poetry.

Simple and luminous Bryant was from beginning to end. For this simple luminosity he paid the price of that de- His liberate coolness which Lowell thus satirized in the Fable for Critics, of 1848:

"There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,

As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,

Save when by reflection 't is kindled o' nights

With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation
(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,-
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em,
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,

Like being stirred up with the very North Pole."

If Bryant's careful attention to luminosity, however, prevented him from ever being passionate, and gave his work the character so often mistaken for commonplace, it never deprived him of tender delicacy. Take, for example, "The Death of the Flowers," of which the opening line

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year"—

Simplicity.

His Melancholy.

is among his most familiar. The last two stanzas run as follows:

"And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will

come,

To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;

When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are

still,

And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,

The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,

And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

"And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.

In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers."

To a generation familiar with all the extravagances of nineteenth-century romanticism, a feeling so deliberately restrained, so close to sentimentality, may well seem unimpassioned. But one cannot dwell on these lines without feeling genuine sweetness of temper, or without finally discerning, in what at first seems chilly deliberation of phrase, what is rather a loving care for every syllable.

The allusion in the last stanza is to the early death from consumption of Bryant's sister. Only a few years before his father had died of the same disease. So he had personal reason for melancholy. As one looks through his work, however, one is apt to wonder whether, even if his life had been free from personal bereavement, his verse might not still have hovered sentimentally about the dead. His most successful poem, "Thanatopsis," was apparently written before death had often come near him; and it is

hardly excessive to say that if a single name were sought for his collected works, from beginning to end, a version of that barbarous Greek title might be found suitable, and the whole volume fairly entitled "Glimpses of the Grave." Of course he touched on other things; but he touched on mortality so constantly as to make one feel regretfully sure that whenever he felt stirred to poetry his fancy started for the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In this, of course, he was not peculiar. The subject had such fascination for eighteenth-century versifiers that Blair and Young made it the chief motive for a considerable body of verse, and in 1751 Gray's Elegy crowned this school of poetry with an undying masterpiece. This underlying impulse of Bryant's poetry, we thus perceive, was general in the middle of the eighteenth century; yet Bryant's style, distinctly affected by that of Cowper, and still more by that of Wordsworth, clearly belongs to the nineteenth. Bryant thus reverses the relation of substance to style which we remarked in the prose of his contemporary, Irving. Imbued with nineteenth-century romantic temper, Irving wrote in the classical style of the century before; Bryant, writing in the simple, luminous style of his own century, expressed a somewhat formal sentimentality which had hardly characterized vital work in England for fifty years.

Such was the eldest of our nineteenth-century poets, Summary. the first whose work was recognized abroad. He has never been widely popular; and in the course of a century whose poetry has been chiefly marked by romantic passion, he has tended to seem more and more commonplace. But those who think him commonplace forget his historical significance. His work was really the first which proved

to England what native American poetry might be. The Old World was looking for some wild manifestation of this new, hardly apprehended, western democracy. Instead, what it found in Bryant, the one poetic contemporary of Irving and Cooper whose writings have lasted, was fastidious over-refinement, tender sentimentality, and pervasive luminosity. Refinement, in short, and conscious refinement, groups Bryant with Irving, with Cooper, and with Brockden Brown. In its beginning the American literature of the nineteenth century was marked rather by delicacy than by strength, or by any such outburst of previously unphrased emotion as on general principles democracy might have been expected to excite.

V

EDGAR ALLAN POE

REFERENCES

WORKS: Works, ed. Stedman and Woodberry, 10 vols., Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894-95; Works ("Virginia Edition") ed. J. A. Harrison, 17 vols., New York: Crowell, 1902.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: *G. E. Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe, Houghton, 1885 (AML); J. A. Harrison, Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., New York: Crowell, 1903; *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter vii; L. E. Gates, Studies and Appreciations, New York: Macmillan, 1900, pp. 110-128.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stedman and Woodberry, X, 267–281; J. A. Harrison's Life, I, 431-455.

SELECTIONS: Carpenter, 276–302; Duyckinck, II, 539–545; Griswold, Poetry, 470-478; Griswold, Prose, 524-530; Stedman, 144-151; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 429-469.

IN April, 1846, EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) published in Godey's Lady's Book an elaborate article on William Cullen Bryant. In the six following numbers of the same periodical, appeared that series of comments on the literary personages of the day which were collected under the name of the Literati (1850). The personal career of Poe was so erratic that one can hardly group him with any definite literary school. It seems, however, more than accidental that his principal critical work concerned the contemporary literature of New York; and though he was born in Boston and passed a good deal of his life in Virginia, he spent his literary years rather more in New York than anywhere else. Accordingly this seems the most fitting place to consider him.