William Cullen Bryant born Nov. 3, 1794. First poems printed, March 18, 1807. “The Embargo” printed, 1808. “The Genius of Columbia,” 1810. Enters Williams College, Oct., 1810. Leaves Williams College, May, 1811. “Thanatopsis” written, 1812. Begins the Study of Law, 1812. Admitted to the Bar, 1815. “Thanatopsis” printed, 1817. Marries Miss Fanny Fairchild, 1821. Delivers “The Ages” at Harvard, 1821. Removes to New-York City, 1825. Union of “The New-York Review” and “The New-York Literary Gazette,” March 17, 1826. Becomes Assistant Editor of “The Evening Post,” 1826. Edits “The Talisman” with Verplanck and Sands, 1827–1830. Becomes chief Editor of “The Evening Post,” 1829. First European Tour, 1834–1836. “The Fountain, and others Poems,” published, 1842. First Tour in the South, March–May, 1843. “The White-Footed Deer, and other Poems,” published, 1844. Purchases the Estate at Roslyn, 1845. Second European Tour, April–Dec., 1845. Delivers the Oration on Thomas Cole, 1848. Second Tour in the South, and First Visit to Cuba, March–May, 1849. Third European Tour, June–Oct., 1849. “Letters of a Traveller” published, 1850. Presides at the Banquet to Kossuth, Dec. 9, 1851. Delivers the Oration on J. Fennimore Cooper, Feb. 25, 1852. Fourth European Tour, Visit to the Holy Land, and Second Visit to Cuba, 1852. A Complete Edition of Poems published, 1854. Fifth European Tour, and First Visit to Spain, 1857–1858. Baptized at Naples, April, 1858. Dangerous Illness of Mrs. Bryant at Naples, May, 1858. “Letters from Spain and other Countries,” published, 1859. Address at the Schiller Festival, Nov. 11, 1859. Delivers the Oration on Washington Irving, 1860. Made Presidential Elector, 1860. “Thirty Poems” published, 1863. Seventieth Birthday Celebrated by the Century Club, Nov. 3, 1864. Death of Mrs. Bryant, June, 1866. Last European Tour, 1867. The Free-Trade Banquet to Bryant, Jan. 30, 1868. “Letters from the East” published, 1869. Delivers the Oration on Fitz-Greene Halleck, Feb. 3, 1869. Translation of “The Iliad” published, 1870. Delivers the Oration on Gulian C. Verplanck, May 17, 1870. Translation of “The Odyssey” published, 1871, Address on Italian Unity, Jan., 1871. Address on the Unveiling of the Morse Statue, June 10, 1871. Tour in Mexico, Winter of 1871–72. Address on the Unveiling of the Shakespeare Statue, May, 22, 1872. Address on Reform, Sept. 23, 1872. Address on the Scott Statue, Nov. 4, 1872. Visited by the Commemorative Committee, Nov. 3, 1874. “The Flood of Years” published, 1876. Presentation of the Commemorative Vase, June 20, 1876. Delivers the Oration on Mazzini, May 29, 1878. Death of Bryant, June 12, 1878. Burial, June 14, 1878.

Personal

  With one exception (and that’s Irving) you are the man I most wanted to see in America. You have been here twice, and I have not seen you. The fault was not mine; for on the evening of my arrival committee-gentlemen were coming in and out until long after I had your card put into my hands. As I lost what I most eagerly longed for, I ask you for your sympathy, and not for your forgiveness. Now, I want to know when you will come and breakfast with me: and I don’t call to leave a card at your door before asking you, because I love you too well to be ceremonious with you. I have a thumbed book at home, so well worn that it has nothing upon the back but one gilt “B,” and the remotest possible traces of a “y.” My credentials are in my earnest admiration of its beautiful contents.

  In height, he is, perhaps, five feet nine. His frame is rather robust. His features are large but thin. His countenance is sallow, nearly bloodless. His eyes are piercing gray, deep set, with large projecting eyebrows. His mouth is wide and massive, the expression of the smile hard, cold—even sardonic. The forehead is broad, with prominent organs of ideality; a good deal bald; the hair thin and grayish, as are also the whiskers, which he wears in a simple style. His bearing is quite distinguished, full of the aristocracy of intellect…. His dress is plain to the extreme of simplicity, although of late there is a certain degree of Anglicism about it. In character no man stands more loftily than Bryant. The peculiarly melancholy expression of his countenance has caused him to be accused of harshness, or coldness of heart. Never was there a greater mistake. His soul is charity itself, in all respects generous and noble. His manners are undoubtedly reserved.

  It is consistent when we find the poet’s home a great, old-time mansion, so embosomed in trees and vines that we can hardly catch satisfactory glimpses of the bay on which it lies, through the leafy windows, of which an overhanging roof prolongs the shade. No greener, quieter, or more purely simple retreat can be found; none with which the owner and his tastes and occupations are more in keeping. It would be absurd to say that all appearance of show or style is carefully avoided for it requires very little observation to perceive that these are absent from the place simply because they never entered its master’s mind. I suppose if anything could completely displease Mr. Bryant with this beloved home, it would be the addition of any outward costliness, or even elegance, calculated to attract the attention of the passing stranger. Friend Richard Kirk—a Quaker of the Quakers, if he may be judged by his works—little thought, when he built this great, ample, square dwelling-place, in the lap of the hills, in 1787, that he was fashioning the house of a poet—one worthy to be spared when temple and tower went to the ground, because it is the sanctuary of a priest of Nature.

  Yesterday, while we were at dinner, Mr. ——— called. I never saw him but once before, and that was at the door of our little red cottage in Lenox, he sitting in a wagon with one or two of the Sedgwicks, merely exchanging a greeting with me from under the brim of his straw hat, and driving on. He presented himself now with a long white beard, such as a palmer might have worn as the growth of his long pilgrimages, a brow almost entirely bald, and what hair he has quite hoary; a forehead impending, yet not massive; dark, bushy eyebrows and keen eyes, without much softness in them; a dark and sallow complexion; a slender figure, bent a little with age, but at once alert and infirm. It surprised me to see him so venerable; for, as poets are Apollo’s kinsmen, we are inclined to attribute to them his enviable quality of never growing old. There was a weary look in his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough to see and do, if need were. My family gathered about him, and he conversed with great readiness and simplicity about his travels, and whatever other subject came up…. His maners and whole aspect are very particularly plain, though not affectedly so; but it seems as if in the decline of life, and the security of his position, he had put off whatever artificial polish he may have heretofore had, and resumed the simpler habits and deportment of his early New England breeding. Not but what you discover, nevertheless, that he is a man of refinement, who has seen the world, and is well aware of his own place in it…. He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information, on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with, but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with one’s own. He shook hands kindly all around, but not with any warmth of grip, although the ease of his deportment had put us all on sociable terms with him.

  As a poet, as a journalist, as a patriot, as a pure and upright man, living to an almost patriarchal age, yet never losing his interest, or relaxing his efforts, in whatever might advance the honor or welfare of his fellow-men, he has won for himself an imperishable remembrance on the page of history.

  From his childhood and through all his eighty-four years his habits of life were temperate and careful…. He rose early, took active exercise, walked far and easily, spared work at night, yet had time for every duty of a fully occupied life, and at seventy-one sat down in the shadow of the great sorrow of his life to seek a wise distraction in translating the Iliad and the Odyssey. His sobriety was effortless; it was that of a sound man, not of an ascetic. He was not a vegetarian nor a total abstainer from wine; but of tobacco, he said, playfully, that he did not meddle with it except to quarrel with its use. No man ever bore the burden of years more lightly, and men of younger generations saw with admiration and amazement an agility that shamed their own. At four-score his eyes were undimmed, and his ears had a boy’s acuteness.

  It is the glory of this man that his character outshone even his great talent and his large fame. Distinguished equally for his native gifts and his consummate culture, his poetic inspiration and his exquisite art, he is honored and loved to-day even more for his stainless purity of life, his unswerving rectitude of will, his devotion to the higher interests of his race, his unfeigned patriotism, and his broad humanity. It is remarkable that with none of the arts of popularity a man so little dependent on others’ appreciation, so self-subsistent and so retiring, who never sought nor accepted office, who had little taste for coöperation, and no bustling zeal in ordinary philanthropy, should have drawn to himself the confidence, the honor, and reverence of a great metropolis, and become, perhaps it is not too much to say, our first citizen.

  And so the good, stainless, noble old citizen and poet lies in the closed coffin there—and this is his funeral. A solemn, impressive, simple scene, to spirit and senses. The remarkable gathering of gray heads, celebrities—the finely render’d anthem, and other music—the church, dim even now at approaching noon, in its light from the mellow-stain’d windows—the pronounc’d eulogy on the bard who loved Nature so fondly, and sung so well her shows and seasons.

  Mr. Bryant’s face and figure was one well known to Americans. He was a handsome old man, having a slight, erect form, a fine head, and a white flowing beard. His eyes, when his mind was excited with a peculiar mirth which he had, glittered through their half-shut lids with a gem-like brilliancy. At the time when I knew him he was already past eighty. He wrote but little in his newspaper, and he never was a talkative man. But both in his conversation and in the little writing which he now and then did, it was common to meet with some stroke of his sense or exact imagination…. I have omitted one ingredient in the reputation of Mr. Bryant in America; there was in it something of Franklin. He was a man of rules, an early riser, and very nearly a vegetarian. Having been often asked as to the methods by which he had accomplished so much, he gave to the world the hygienic and literary regulations which he had observed throughout his long life. He had always much to say against affectation and against modern extravagance of living. He thus figured to the younger generation as the representative of old-fashioned New England sagacity and simplicity.

  Mr. Bryant was a poet who could take care of himself and get a living. He could not only do this, but he could do a wise and manly part in guiding the politics of the country. He could not only manage his own private and family affairs in a prosperous way, but he could discharge his duties as a citizen and a member of society. In his own personal character and history he associated probity with genius, purity with art, and the sweetest Christianity with the highest culture. He has proved to all the younger generation of poets that hysterics are not inspiration, that improvidence is not an unerring sign of genius, that Christian conviction and Christian character are not indications of weakness, but are rather a measure of strength, and that a man may be a poet and a poet a man.

  There was a mournful propriety in the circumstances of the death of Bryant. He was stricken just as he had discharged a characteristic duty with all the felicity for which he was noted, and he was probably never wholly conscious from that moment. Happily we may believe that he was sensible of no decay, and his intimate friends had noted little. He was hale, erect, and strong to the last. All his life a lover of nature and an advocate of liberty, he stood under the trees in the beautiful park on a bright June day, and paid an eloquent tribute to a devoted servant of liberty in another land. And while his words yet lingered in the ears of those who heard him, he passed from human sight. There is probably no eminent man in the country upon whose life and genius and career the verdict of his fellow-citizens would be more immediate and unanimous. His character and life had a simplicity and austerity of outline that had become universally familiar, like a neighbouring mountain or the sea. His convictions were very strong, and his temper uncompromising; he was independent beyond most Americans. He was an editor and a partisan; but he held politics and all other things subordinate to the truth and the common welfare, and his earnestness and sincerity and freedom from selfish ends took the sting of personality from his opposition, and constantly placated all who, like him, sought lofty and virtuous objects.

  The serenity and dignity so manifest in Bryant’s writings were notable also in his person. The poet was often depicted by pencil and pen. The phrenologists exhausted their skill upon his noble head, and the painters and engravers their art upon his face. The former believed him to approach the ideal of Spurzheim in his phrenological developments, and the latter deemed him to possess the fine artistic features of Titian and of the Greek poet whom he translated. It is a consolation to age, when protected by a wise and orderly regulated life, that its inherent dignity supplies the want, if not the place, of youth, and that the veneration and serenity which surround it more than compensate for the passions which turbulence renders dangerous. To such an honored age as this Bryant attained; calm, circumspect, and sedate, he passed the perilous portals of Parnassus with his crown of laurel untarnished and unwithered by the baser breath that sometimes lurks like a poison within its leaves. He more resembled Dante in the calm dignity of his nature, though happily not in the violent and oppressive affliction of his life, than any other poet in history.

  Probably the title of the Great American could be as fittingly applied to Bryant as to any man our nation has produced. He has been happily called the Puritan Greek; and this epithet applies equally well to his life as to his writings. If he was a Stoic in his earlier years, he was as unmistakably a Christian in later life. During both periods he was pure as ice, lofty in thought, noble in deed,—an inspiration toward the True Life to all who watched his course. No errors of passion or of over-heated blood did he have to mourn over, even in youth; yet he was not cold or unimpassioned, as his deep devotion throughout life to the woman of his choice proved. He led emphatically the intellectual life, with as little admixture of the flesh as possible; yet the warm currents of feeling were never dried up in his nature, but bubbled up freshly to the end. He lived largely on the heights of life, yet he was not uncharitable to the weaknesses and follies he saw everywhere about him, but rather looked upon them with a half-pitying tenderness; and he dropped a tear occasionally where the integrity of his own nature counselled a stern reproof.

  Bryant’s office desk was his newspaper Egeria. It was also a curiosity. Except for a space immediately in front of him about two feet long and eighteen inches deep, his desk was usually covered to the depth of from twelve to twenty inches with opened letters, manuscript, pamphlets, and books, the accumulation of years. During his absence in Europe in 1859–60, his associate thought to do Bryant a good turn by getting rid of this rubbish and clearing his table so that he should have room for at least one of his elbows on the table. When he returned and saw what had been done, it was manifest from his expression—he said nothing—that what had been so kindly intended was regarded as anything but a kindness. He had also one habit in common with Pope, of always writing his “copy” for the paper on the backs of these old letters and rejected MSS. One who was associated with him for many years in the management of the Evening Post affirms that he never knew Bryant to write an article for its columns on a fresh sheet of paper. He also used a quill pen, which he was in the habit of mending with a knife nearly as old as himself, and which might originally have cost him fifty cents. He has been heard to speak of this knife with affection, and to resent the suggestion that he should replace it with a better one. Every year had added a value to it which no new knife could possibly have in his eyes. The same attachment to old servants made him hold on to a blue cotton umbrella which had very little to commend it either in fair weather or foul but its age. The ladies of his household at last, and when he was about setting out for Mexico, conspired against the umbrella, hid it away, and in its place packed a nice new silk one. He discovered the fraud that had been practised upon him, turned his back upon the parvenu, and insisted upon the restoration of his old and injured friend to its accustomed post of honor by his side. To him age made everything sacred but abuses. He petted the old brutes of his barnyard and stables, and held to his old friends with hooks of steel, closing his eyes resolutely to everything about them which he could not admire.

  Mr. Bryant illustrated as truly as Burns himself the maxim that the poet is born and not made, yet no votary of the Muses ever reconciled more completely the exalted aspiration and inspiration of the poet with the commonplace desperations of active and useful life. As fond of rural beauty as Theocritus or Catullus, and as fascinated by country life as Horace or Virgil, he yet for half a century attended at his editorial desk with inexorable punctuality. His Pegasus was never chained to his cart-horse. When Pegasus took his flight to the skies, the cart-horse still turned his honest furrow in the ground.

  He was by no means the leonine Jupiter of Launt Thompson’s colossal bust. His frame was small, his features were delicate, and at the last there was something a little over-powering in his full and flowing beard.

  The memory of that early married life never grew dim. Mr. Godwin says that fifty-five years after his marriage, and ten years after his wife’s death, the poet visited once more the house where the marriage had taken place. He walked about for some time, saying nothing; but as he was about to turn away he exclaimed, “There is not a spire of grass her foot has not touched,” and his eyes filled with tears. Beneath that calm and undemonstrative exterior lay hid the deepest and tenderest feeling.

  His firm old features, encircled by a cloud of snowy hair and beard, would have impressed anybody; but in the distinction of Bryant’s appearance there was something more than accident of feature, and something far more significant in the history of literary America. One does not remember his mane as in the least assertive. Rather to those who, without knowing him, saw him at a distance, his aspect was gentle, kindly, calmly venerable. But it had not the simplicity of unconsciousness. Whatever he really felt, he looked like a man who felt himself considerable, and certainly the qualities for which he most valued himself were not those which as journalist and man of business had made him a man of fortune. The thing for which he most respected himself was his work as a poet; and beyond question it was his work as a poet which the public most willingly recognised. The distinction he may have felt,—the distinction which he certainly received from his contemporaries, and which came to be so embodied in his personal appearance,—was wholly due to his achievement as a man of letters.

  In my studio Bryant’s head came out with wonderful picturesqueness. I had never before had such a model. It would have been a delight to make oil-color studies of it, strong in effects of light and shade; but this was not what Bryant had come for. I chose a view of the face which I thought was getting most directly at the man, though not his most characteristic appearance; but still, with the beautifully formed head and face, the long white hair mingling with the flowing white beard, there was no lack of the pictorial element.

Editor

  I ought to answer your question about the New York “Evening Post.” I am a small proprietor in the establishment, and am a gainer by the arrangement. It will afford me a comfortable livelihood after I have paid for the eighth part, which is the amount of my share. I do not like politics any better than you do; but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation.

  During Mr. Bryant’s editorial career of more than fifty years, have been waged the most important political conflicts in the history of the Republic, and in these he has manfully participated. On questions of national policy concerning the old United States Bank, the war with Mexico, the admission of slavery into the territories and its abolition, the tariff, the Ashburton treaty, the war of the rebellion, amnesty, the Alabama claims, the San Domingo muddle, civil service, resumption of specie payments, and other subjects of vital importance, his utterances have been prompt, unequivocal, and just; and he has maintained his principles with an unshaken constancy. He has never waited to catch the breath of popular opinion before flinging abroad his standard. The question with him has always been, “What is right? What subserves human interests best? What is the province and duty of government?” And so he has been the uncompromising enemy of political rings, class legislation, and jobbery, and corruption of all sorts, and the friend and ally of humane and liberal institutions, righteous reform, and the administration of impartial justice. Indeed, there is no species of political iniquity that he has not vigorously assailed, and no doctrines of permanent advantage to the commonwealth that he has not judiciously advocated and set firmer in the minds and hearts of men. He is a statesman of the best type and, as has been said by a distinguished senator, “he is a teacher of statesmen.” He has asked nothing of his country but the privilege to serve her interests. Not even his bitterest political opponents have ever accused him of a desire for public office. It is one of the marvels of his great career that, amid the engrossing labors and cares of editorial life, he has kept a sweet temper for scholastic pursuits.

  Behind this editor’s desk there sat a master of many languages, a traveler in foreign lands, a student of various sciences, a poet of unquestioned genius, a moralist of high principles, a critic of keen penetration. The man in whom all these were united made it a special object of endeavor always to write the best thoughts in the best manner.

  But although as a journalist Bryant took high ground and defended it firmly, he was never carried away by the fury of partisan discussion. In his editorial writings, as in his poetry, the tone is full of dignity. Calm in his strength, he was both temperate in expressing his opinions and good-tempered. He fought fairly and he respected his adversary. He was never a snarling critic either of men or of measures. He elevated the level of the American newspaper, but it was by his practice, not by his preaching. He was choice in his own use of words, and there was in the office of the Evening Post a list of words and phrases not allowed in its pages. But he was not a stickler for trifles, and he had no fondness for petty pedantries.

  I obtained the position of fine-art editor of the “Evening Post,” then edited by W. C. Bryant, a position which did not interfere with my work in the studio…. My relations with Bryant were intellectually profitable to me. He was a man who enjoyed the highest consideration amongst our contemporary journalists,—of inflexible integrity in politics as well as in business affairs…. Bryant was held to be a cold man, not only in his poetry, but in his personal relations; but I think that, so far as his personality was concerned, this was a mistake. He impressed me as a man of strong feelings, who had at some time been led by a too explosive expression of them to dread his own passions and who had, therefore, cultivated a repression which became the habit of his life. The character of his poetry, little sympathetic with human passion, and given to the worship of nature, confirmed the general impression of coldness which his manner suggested. I never saw him in anger, but I felt that the barrier which prevented it was too slight to make it safe for any one to venture to touch it. A supreme sense of justice went with a somewhat narrow personal horizon, a combination which, while it made him hold the balance of judgment level, so far as the large world of politics was concerned, made him often too bitter in his controversies touching political questions; but the American political daily paper has never had a nobler type than the “Evening Post” under Bryant. Demonstrative he never was, even with his intimates, but to the constancy and firmness of his friendship all who knew him well could testify, and, as long as he lived, our relations were unchanged, though my wandering ways brought me seldom near him in later years.

The Embargo, 1808

  Among instances of literary precocity, there are few recorded more remarkable than that of Bryant. Tasso, when nine years old, wrote some lines to his mother, which have been praised; Cowley, at ten, finished his “Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe;” Pope, when twelve, the “Ode to Solitude;” and the “wondrous boy Chatterton,” at the same age, some verses entitled “A Hymn for Christmas Day;” but none of these pieces evidence the possession of more genius than is displayed in Bryant’s “Embargo” and “Spanish Revolution,” written in his thirteenth year.

  It was just as good and just as bad as most American imitations of Pope; but the boy indicated a facility in using the accredited verse of the time which excited the wonder and admiration of his elders. Vigor, compactness, ringing emphasis in the constantly recurring rhymes,—all seemed to show that a new Pope had been born in Massachusetts.

Thanatopsis, 1812–17

  A noble example of true poetical enthusiasm. It alone would establish the author’s claim to the honors of genius.

  “Thanatopsis” is the poem by which its author is best known, but is by no means his best poem. It owes the extent of its celebrity to its nearly absolute freedom from defect, in the ordinary understanding of the term. I mean to say that its negative merit recommends it to the public attention. It is a thoughtful, well-phrased, well-constructed, well-versified poem. The concluding thought is exceedingly noble, and has done wonders for the success of the whole composition.

  The poem which is, perhaps, the highest expression of his genius, and the best known of any American poem, is “Thanatopsis.”… There is not, probably, an educated man now living among our English race in whose mind this solemn and beautiful meditation is not associated with “the last bitter hour.” Its pictured phrases occur at every coming up of the grisly thought that haunts us all. Its serene philosophy has touched thousands who could never reason calmly for themselves upon the inevitable order of nature. It leaves a clear impression upon the memory that defies the blur of misquotation, for its well chosen words are united by the cohesive power of genius, like the cemented blocks of Old World temples, into imperishable forms.

  The perfection of its rhythm, the majesty and dignity of the tone of matured reflection which breathes through it, the solemnity of its underlying sentiment, and the austere unity of the pervading thought, would deceive almost any critic into affirming it to be the product of an imaginative thinker to whom “years had brought the philosophic mind.”… It is doubtful if Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” has been excelled by the many deep and beautiful poems which he has written since. In his case, as in that of Wordsworth, we are puzzled by the old head suddenly erected on young shoulders. They leap over the age of passion by a single bound, and become poetic philosophers at an age when other poets are in the sensuous stage of imaginative development.

  It was the first adequate poetic voice of the solemn New England spirit; and in the grandeur of the hills, in the heroic Puritan tradition of sacrifice and endurance, in the daily life, saddened by imperious and awful theologic dogma, in the hard circumstances of the pioneer household, the contest with the wilderness, the grim legends of Indians and the war, have we not some outward clue to the strain of “Thanatopsis,” the depthless and entrancing sadness, as of inexorable fate, that murmurs, like the autumn wind through the forest, in the melancholy cadences of this hymn to Death?

  “Thanatopsis” is a Saxon and New England poem. Its view of death reflects the race characteristics of ten centuries. It shows “no trace of age, no fear to die.” Its morality and its trust are ethnic rather than Christian. It nowhere expresses that belief in personal immortality which the author possessed and elsewhere stated. It is a piece of verse of which any language or age might be proud. Yet, as I have just said, this strong and serene utterance of philosophy and of poetry, expressed in the best blank verse of the period, came from a mere boy, who but a few years before had been writing political poems, dashed with fire and vitriol, on “The Embargo” and “The Spanish Revolution.” In its earliest publication “Thanatopsis” was much less than perfect, and was manifestly inferior to the final version. But even then it was, as it is now, a microcosm of the author’s mind and powers.

  It appeared in the September number of the “North American Review” for 1817, and proved to be not only the finest poem which had yet been produced on this continent, but one of the most remarkable poems ever produced at such an early age, and a poem which would have added to the fame of almost any poet of any age, while it would have detracted from the fame of none. From the day this poem appeared, the name of its author, which till then had scarcely been heard farther from home than the range of the human voice, was classed among the most cherished literary assets of the nation. Like the mythic Hermes, who before the sun had reached its zenith on the day of his birth had stolen and slaughtered the cattle of Apollo, young William Cullen Bryant, with scarcely less startling precocity, before he was out of his teens had possessed himself of Apollo’s lyre, and established himself as the undisputed laureate of America.

  Begotten in the woods not yet cleared from the neighborhood of his home, the edge of the primeval forests which for centuries had covered the shores of the New World—it revealed the secrets which lurked under their boughs, and was peopled with shadows and memories of vanished and forgotten races. By no poet before or since was the universality of Death so strongly stated, and so impressively expressed.

The Ages, 1821

  There is running through the whole of this little collection, a strain of pure and high sentiment, that expands and lifts up the soul and brings it nearer to the source of moral beauty. This is not indefinitely and obscurely shadowed but it animates bright images and clear thoughts. There is everywhere a simple and delicate portraiture of the subtle and ever vanishing beauties of nature, which she seems willing to conceal as her choicest things, and which none but minds the most susceptible can seize, and no other than a writer of great genius, can body forth in words. There is in this poetry something more than mere painting. It does not merely offer in rich colours what the eye may see or the heart feel, or what may fill the imagination with a religious grandeur. It does not merely rise to sublime heights of thought, with the forms and allusions that obey none but master spirits. Besides these, there are wrought into the composition a luminous philosophy and deep reflection, that make the subjects as sensible to the understanding, as they are splendid to the imagination. There are no slender lines and unmeaning epithets, or words loosely used to fill out the measure. The whole is of rich materials, skilfully compacted. A throng of ideas crowds every part, and the reader’s mind is continually and intensely occupied with “the thick-coming fancies.”

  It is the one improper theme of its author.

  The subject is admirably fitted for the display of power. What can be more susceptible of poetical thought and expression than a rapid review of the history of the world? The theme is a half-inspiration of itself. Mr. Bryant, however, looks with the eye of a philosopher on the varying phases of humanity, and although we read with an attentive pleasure, we do not feel that delight which we know the subject is so admirably calculated to afford. We miss those vigorous, golden passages, which compel us to pause, and read again out of the mere enthusiasm of admiration.

  It is a simple, serious, and thoughtful survey of history, tracing a general law of progress; and the stately Spenserian measure is marked by the moderation, the sinewy simplicity, the maturity and freedom from mannerism, which are Bryant’s sign-manual.

Homer, 1870–77

  Mr. Bryant has long been known, by his original poems, as resembling the old epic poets, in his language, more than any other living writer of English. It may be said that contemporary poets have excelled his verse, one in splendor, another in suggestiveness, another in fulness of knowledge and in reach of thought, and more than one in nearness to the great mental conflicts of the age; but he has certainly not been surpassed, perhaps not approached by any writer since Wordsworth, in that majestic repose and that self-reliant simplicity which characterized the morning stars of song. He has adhered to the permanent element in our language; and the common perversions in the meaning of good old words, which make it so nearly impossible even for most men of culture to write a sentence that Chaucer could have understood, seem to be unknown to him. No qualification for a translator of Homer could be more essential than this; and the reader who has duly considered its importance will find that it has given Mr. Bryant’s translation a vast superiority over all others. The simplicity of Professor Newman’s ballad verse is gained only by the sacrifice of dignity; that of the writers of English hexameters is mere baldness; even that of Lord Derby is habitually weak, forced and halting; but that of Mr. Bryant is at once majestic and direct, at once noble, rapid, and vigorous; it is, in a large degree, the simplicity of Homer.

  He worked only in the mornings, after his usual exercise, when both mind and body were fresh. With a copy of Homer open on his desk, and a lexicon near by, he wrote for three or four hours, and then laid his papers aside for the day. There were other translations on his bookshelves, Chapman, Pope, and Cowper, of course; Voss’s German version, and one in Spanish and another in Italian; later on he procured Professor Blackie’s; but these he consulted only at intervals, to settle some point of construction of which he had doubts. It confused and fettered him, he said, to know how others had done a passage before him. Besides, he intended his version for popular, not learned, use, and he could give it a more popular cast, he thought, with the original text alone for his guide. The fluency with which he commonly wrote is apparent from the manuscript, where page follows page without inconsiderable erasures. Yet, at times, there are pages almost illegible from the number of the interlineations and changes. In original composition his habit was to fix his verses in his head while he was walking the fields, and to commit them to paper afterward; and, as his verbal memory was a retentive one, it is probable he pursued the same method in translating the old Greek.

  The best characteristics of Bryant’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” are: (1), general, though not invariable, fidelity to the text, as compared with former versions by poets of equal rank; (2), simplicity of phrase and style; (3), approximate transfusion of the heroic spirit; (4), a purity of language that pleases a sensible reader. It is not likely that Bryant possessed a scholar’s mastery of even the familiar Ionic Greek, but the text of Homer long has been substantially agreed upon by European editors, there are special lexicons devoted to it, and it is faithfully rendered in German and English translations: so that the poet could have little trouble in adjusting it to his metrical needs. His choice of words is meagre, and so—in a modern sense—was that of Homer; there is no lack of minstrels, nowadays, who ransack their vocabularies to fill our jaded ears with “words, words, words.” As a presentment of standard English the value of these translations is beyond serious cavil. When they are compared with the most faithful and poetic blank-verse rendering which preceded them, the work of Cowper, they show an advance in both accuracy and poetic quality. Lord Derby’s contemporaneous version is dull and inferior. Bryant naturally handled to best advantage his descriptive passages,—the verses in the Fifth Odyssey, which narrate the visit of Hermes to Calypso, furnishing a case in point. His rendering of these is more literal than the favorite transcript by Leigh Hunt, and excels all others in ease and choice of language.

  While giving his readers the genuine spirit of Homer, Bryant has also given them one of the finest specimens of pure Saxon English in our literature. It will reward the curiosity of the philologist to note the large proportion of words of one syllable, the scarcity of words of three or more syllables, and the yet more conspicuous absence of words of Greek or Latin derivation. The sale of the work was to Mr. Bryant at least one gratifying evidence of its merit. Up to May, 1888, 17,000 copies of the Iliad had been sold, yielding him in royalties $12,738. Of the Odyssey, 10,244 copies, yielding in royalties $4,713, making a total income from these translations up to the spring of 1888 of $17,451.

General

  As a poet, he is entitled to rank with the most eminent among us for originality, and finished, chaste execution. He does not offend us by abruptness and inequality. He presents us with here and there a bold image, but the tenor of his poetry is even and sustained. He shows good judgment, and a careful study of the materials of his verse. He does not aim with an over-daring attempt at those lofty and bewildering flights which too often fill the poet’s pages with cloudy and confused representations. His delineations are clear and distinct, and without any indications of an endeavor to be startling and brilliant by strange metaphors, or unlicensed boldness of phraseology. His writings are marked by correct sentiment and propriety of diction.

  His lines “To the Past,” “Lament of Romero,” “Summer Wind,” and everything painting our scenery, I am sure can be eclipsed by nothing of our own day; the first, I have thought, by nothing in the language.

  Bryant is, by very general consent, placed at the head of our poetic department. His writings are distinguished by those graces which belong to naturally fine perceptions and a chastised taste. A deep moral feeling, serious but not sad, tinctures most of his views of man and nature, and insensibly raises thought from the contemplation of these lower objects, to that of the Mind who formed them. Bryant has proved, beyond any other writer, the fruitlessness of our country in poetic topics and illustrations.

  Others before him have sung the beauties of creation, and the greatness of God; but no one ever observed external things more closely, or transferred his impressions to paper in more vivid colors. A violet becomes, in his hands, a gem fit to be placed in an imperial diadem; a mountain leads his eyes to the canopy above it…. On the whole, we may pronounce the book before us, the best volume of American poetry that has yet appeared. The publication of such a volume is an important event in our literature.

  The descriptive writings of Mr. Bryant are essentially American. They transport us into the depths of the primeval forest, to the shores of the lonely lake, the banks of the wild, nameless stream, or the brow of the rocky upland, rising like a promontory from amid a wild ocean of foliage, while they shed around us the glories of a climate fierce in its extremes, but splendid in all its vicissitudes. His close observation of the phenomena of nature and the graphic felicity of his details prevent his descriptions from ever becoming general and commonplace, while he has the gift of shedding over them a pensive grace that blends them all into harmony, and of clothing them with moral associations that make them speak to the heart. Neither, I am convinced, will it be the least of his merits, in your eyes, that his writings are imbued with the independent spirit and buoyant aspirations incident to a youthful, a free, and a rising country.

  None of these poems are long; but condensation is not by any means their distinguishing merit, especially of the descriptive passages; we see much simplicity, but no sublimation; and to us the chief charm of Bryant’s genius consists in a tender pensiveness, a moral melancholy, breathing over all his contemplations, dreams, and reveries, even such as in the main are glad, and giving assurance of a pure spirit, benevolent to all living creatures, and habitually pious in the felt omnipresence of the Creator. His poetry overflows with natural religion—with what Wordsworth calls the “religion of the woods.” The reverential awe of the Invisible pervades the verses entitled “Thanatopsis” and “Forest Hymn,” imparting to them a sweet solemnity which must affect all thinking hearts. There is little that is original either in the imagery of the “Forest Hymn,” or in its language; but the sentiment is simple, natural, and sustained; and the close is beautiful. The one idea is that “the groves were God’s first temples,” and might have been solemnly illustrated; but there is not a single majestical line, and the imagination, hoping to be elevated by the hymn of the high-priest, at times feels languor in the elaborate worship.

  Mr. Bryant, during a long career of authorship, has written comparatively little; but that little is of untold price; ὀλίγον τε διλον τε,—little, but precious and dear. What exquisite taste, what a delicate ear for the music of poetical language, what a fine and piercing sense of the beauties of nature, down to the minutest and most evanescent things! He walks forth in the fields and forests, and not a green or rosy tint, not a flower, or herb, or tree, not a tiny leaf or gossamer tissue, not a strange or familiar plant, escapes his vigilant glance. The naturalist is not keener in searching out the science of nature, than he in detecting all its poetical aspects, effects, analogies, and contrasts. To him, the landscape is a speaking and teaching page. He sees its pregnant meaning, and all its hidden relations to the life of man.

  No poet has described with more fidelity the beauties of the creation, nor sung in nobler song the greatness of the Creator. He is the translator of the silent language of the universe to the world. His poetry is pervaded by a pure and genial philosophy, a solemn, religious tone, that influence the fancy, the understanding, and the heart. He is a national poet. His works are not only American in their subjects and their imagery, but in their spirit. They breathe a love of liberty, a hatred of wrong, and a sympathy with mankind. His genius is not versatile; he has related no history; he has not sung of the passion of love; he has not described artificial life. Still, the tenderness and feeling in the “Death of the Flowers,” “Rizpah,” “The Indian Girl’s Lament,” and other pieces, show that he might have excelled in delineations of the gentler passions, had he made them his study. The melodious flow of his verse, and the rigour and compactness of his language, prove him a perfect master of his art. But the loftiness of his imagination, the delicacy of his fancy, the dignity and truth of his thoughts, constitute a higher claim to our admiration than mastery of the intricacies of rhythm, and of the force and graces of expression.

  Wherever English poetry is read and loved, his poems are known by heart. Collections of poetry, elegant extracts, schoolbooks, “National Readers,” and the like, draw largely upon his pieces. Among American poets his name stands, if not the very first, at least among the two or three foremost. Some of his pieces are perhaps greater favorites with the reading public, than any others written in the United States.

  A few other American poets may excel him in affluence of imagery and variety of tone and subject, but probably none is so essentially poetical in nature. He is so genuine that he testifies to nothing, in scenery or human life, of which he has not had a direct personal consciousness. He follows the primitive bias of his nature rather than the caprices of fancy. His sincerity is the sincerity of character, and not merely the sincerity of a swift imagination, that believes only while it is creating. He does not appear to have the capacity to assume the various points of view, to project himself into forms of being different from his own, to follow any inspiration other than that which springs up in his own individual heart. As a poet, his nature is not broad, sensitive, and genial, but intense, serious, and deep; and we should suppose that his sensibility, pure and earnest as it is, within the bounds of his own individual emotions, would cool from sympathy into antipathy, when exercised on objects beyond its self-limited range. The charge of coldness, which is sometimes brought against him, must have reference to the limitation, not the force of his sympathies.

  The poem [“June”] has always affected me in a remarkable manner. The intense melancholy, which seems to well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet’s cheerful sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul, while there is the truest poetic elevation in the thrill. The impression left is one of a pleasurable sadness.

  He is a sentimental and descriptive poet, neither rising into passion nor prompted to deep reflection; but his thoughts flow naturally and easily, his imagery is often fine, and his pathos as often quite touching. His blank verse is of rare excellence; and his diction, always refined, is sometimes very felicitous. He never fulfilled the promise of genius held out by his youthful “Thanatopsis;” but his most ambitious composition, “The Ages,” is a beautiful representation of gentle fancy and kindly sympathy; and among his smaller pieces, if there be no decisive originality, there is an ideality of taste which has produced some lyrical gems—such as the “Hymn to the North Star,” and the verses “To a Waterfowl.” He produced, in his seventy-sixth year, a book of Eastern Travel, and a blank-verse translation of Homer’s “Iliad,” of considerable merit.

  Bryant has created nothing great; his voice is feeble, melodious, somewhat vague; but pure, solemn, and not imitative. More philosophic than picturesque, the expression of melancholy sensations, born of forest and lake, finds a sweet echo in his verse. The sublime is not his territory; his peculiar charm is chaste and pensive sadness, which associates itself with natural objects and the beings of the creation; he loves them, and the modest piety mingled with this affection, breathes a pathetic grace upon his verse. Christian and English poet, the gentle solemnity of his poetry emanates from his religious conviction…. Bryant by his contemplative gentleness and gravity reminds one of Klopstock; fantasy and free caprice are found in neither.

  The only fault we have to find with Mr. Bryant is that he has written so little, and has chosen to scatter his brilliance amidst a constellation of little poetic stars, rather than to concentrate the light of his genius in some immortal work, which should shine as a planet in the literary horizon to the latest generation.

  His present eminence among all parties, as the unquestioned first poet of the country, has been gained by him in connection with a career which has its daily trials and temptations,—a career which no one but an experienced editor of a newspaper would be likely fully to appreciate. Let me call the attention of the brother poets who are to celebrate his birthday to the undimmed lustre of the laurels worn so long…. For him to have thus set himself the task, and come from it as does Bryant,—the acknowledged most independently reliable editor, as well as the irreproachable first poet, is an example not given us by the ancients.

  I join with all my heart in your wish to honor this native, sincere, original, patriotic poet. I say original; I have heard him charged with being of a certain school. I heard it with surprise, and asked, What school? for he never reminded me of Goldsmith, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Moore. I found him always original—a true painter of the face of this country, and of the sentiment of his own people. When I read the verses of popular American and English poets, I often think that they appear to have gone into the art galleries and to have seen pictures of mountains, but this man to have seen mountains. With his stout staff he has climbed Greylock and the White Hills, and sung what he saw. He renders Berkshire to me in verse, with the sober coloring, too, to which nature cleaves, only now and then permitting herself the scarlet and gold of the prism. It is his proper praise that he first, and he only, made known to mankind our northern landscape—its summer splendor, its autumn russet, its winter lights and glooms. And he is original because he is sincere.

  It will perhaps take a little time, but should not take more than a little, for poetical students fresh from the poetry of to-day to adjust themselves properly to the study of such poems as these. Instead of a style “bourré par l’idée à en craquer,” and subjects fetched from all heaven and earth, they will find a singularly simple and straightforward fashion of verse, dealing mainly with one theme and satisfied with that. With the mechanism of his art the poet apparently troubles himself very little, or conceals his efforts very cunningly. There is scarcely a new or unusual metrical effect throughout the book; the language is as little studied as the versification; and the subjects, however various, are generally treated in such a manner as to come very much under one head. But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that these poems, because they lack certain characteristics more or less effective, are either monotonous or trivial…. From his earliest poems, the “Waterfowl,” the oddly named “Thanatopsis,” and the rest, to those of only a year or two ago, he observes the worship of nature with no diminished zeal and no diminished power. Very rarely has any writer preserved such an even level of merit throughout his poems, the absence of any particularly absorbing theme being compensated by the steady attention which he pays to his one subject.

  William Cullen Bryant is able to hear the great harmony of nature in her gentlest and in her most powerful tones. But he paints by preference the quiet life of nature and of man, and the depth of his feeling enables him to find the most precious pearls of songs in the simplest scenes. Such are the “Indian’s Complaint at the Graves of his Fathers” and the “Song of the Pitcairn Islander.” His poetry much resembles that of Cowper and Gray, but there is such a specifically American tone in it that he has been rightly called the first original poet of his country.

  The father of the present generation of American poets, and one of the most original of the brotherhood.

  Of course it would be absurd to rank Bryant with Wordsworth, but he was something more than a copy on a small scale of one side of a great poet. He sees that what is the whole of life to Wordsworth is only a part of his life and of the life of the world. And his preoccupation with death and with the transitoriness of life gives him an originality of his own…. His date and his nationality save him from being classed with English minor poets; they are always straining at the unattainable or else sinking back in conscious depression; whereas the sober dignity natural to Bryant was sustained by the consciousness that all his life he was one of the first poets of his age and country.

  To Bryant, beyond all other modern poets, the earth was a theatre upon which the great drama of life was everlastingly played…. The qualities by which Mr. Bryant’s poetry are chiefly distinguished are serenity and gravity of thought; an intense though repressed recognition of the morality of mankind; an ardent love for human freedom; an unrivalled skill in painting the scenery of his native land. He had no superior in his walk of poetic art—it might almost be said no equal, for his descriptions of nature are never inaccurate or redundant. “The Excursion” is a tiresome poem, which contains several exquisite episodes. Mr. Bryant knew how to write exquisite episodes, and to omit the platitudes through which we reach them in other poets.

  His poetry kept its essential intellectual type, and did not glow with passion or burn with martial fire. He had neither epic fulness, nor dramatic compass and force…. He was in his way scholastic in poetry, a disciple of his own set school; and with his wonderful sense of beauty he never ventures to lose his calmness or in any way to be unwise. He never said a foolish thing, and rarely, if ever, did an unwise one. Even love, which makes so many men fools, made him thoughtful; and his one sacred love went forth in calm idyls and rose into godly hymns, and never burned with wasting fires…. His poetry was little personal, and shy of men and women, he was more at home, especially in earlier life, with Nature.

  That “rock-loving columbine” is better than Bryant’s “columbines in purple dressed,” as our flower is not purple, but yellow and scarlet. Yet Bryant set the example to the poets that have succeeded him of closely studying Nature as she appears under her own skies. I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness and simplicity of his poems of nature, and in general of their correctness of observation. They are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords that no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so firm a hand. Yet he was not always an infallible observer; he sometimes tripped upon his facts, and at other times he deliberately moulded them, adding to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse.

  “Bryant’s sonnets are so few that I could repeat them all without wearying you; but as you are already familiar with them, I shall merely specialize several in the line wherein he excels all our modern poets, namely, the loving and reverent worship and interpretation of Nature in her serenest moods. I allude particularly to his sonnets on ‘Midsummer,’ ‘October,’ and ‘November;’ and, as I read them, give attention to the exceeding delicacy and minuteness of their detail coupled with their breadth and largeness, and also to the warmth and sober richness of their coloring. I have read them a hundred times, but never without discovering some new beauty to be enjoyed, or without marvelling at the power of dilatation and contraction of poetic vision, and the extraordinary poetic sensibility, which have made descriptions so glowing and so true possible to be transferred to words within a scope so limited…. Bryant and Whittier belong to different grades as artists, though both are pre-eminently gifted with quick poetic sensibility, and the faculty of picturesque poetic utterance. Bryant’s imagination is the loftiest; his conceptions are grander, his thoughts more exalted, his style purer, his powers of generalization greater, his coloring firmer and truer than Whittier’s.”

  Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world—bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders—always lurkingly fond of threnodies—beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties—morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus.

  His life, public and private, was in keeping with his speech and writings. We often say of a poet or artist that he should not be judged like other men by his outward irrelevant mark or habit; that to see his best, his truest self you must read his poems or study his paintings. In reading Bryant’s prose and verse, and in observing the poet himself, our judgments were the same. He always held in view liberty, law, wisdom, piety, faith; his sentiment was unsentimental; he never whined nor found fault with condition or nature; he was robust, but not tyrannical; frugal, but not too severe; grave, yet full of shrewd and kindly humor. Absolute simplicity characterized him. Ethics were always in sight. He was, indeed, an “old man for counsel;” but he learned in youth from the lives and precepts of Washington, Hamilton, and their compeers, that he taught and practised to the last. His intellectual faculties, like his physical, were balanced to the discreetest level, and this without abasing his poetic fire. His genius was not shown by the advance of one faculty and the impediment of others; it was the spirit of an even combination, and a fine one…. The delights of nature, and meditations upon the universality of life and death, withdrew him from the study of the individual world. Thus he became a philosophic minstrel of the woods and waters, the foremost of American landscape poets…. No doubt Bryant’s models confirmed his natural restrictions of speech. But even this narrow verbal range has made his poetry strong and pure; and now, when expression has been carried to its extreme, it is an occasional relief to recur to the clearness, to the exact appreciation of words, discoverable in every portion of his verse and prose. It is like a return from a florid renaissance to the antique; and indeed there was something Doric in Bryant’s nature. His diction, like his thought, often refreshes us as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land…. Give his poems a study, and their simplicity is their charm.

  The life of William Cullen Bryant is an integral part of American literature. His long, honorable career as a journalist and citizen have also identified him with the best interets of his native land. In the later years of his life he wrote quite a number of hymns…. His religious views also ripened and grew more spiritual as he neared the grave.

  Bryant’s genius is not seen to best advantage in his “Wild-Life” poems. It is in meditation verse, such as the “Thanatopsis” and “Lines to a Waterfowl,” that the majesty and grave eloquence which characterise his genius become most readily apparent.

  His place was with Gray, not with Milton, Goethe, Browning, or Burns. Intense power was not his, nor broad creative range, nor soaring vision; his marks were thoughtfulness and serenity.

  Bryant appears to me to be a poet of a less attractive but somewhat higher class than Longfellow. His versification is mannered, and his expressions are directly formed on European models, but his sense of style was so consistent that his careful work came to be recognisable. His poetry is a hybrid of two English stocks, closely related; he belongs partly to the Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey,” partly to the Coleridge of “Mont Blanc.” The imaginative formula is Wordsworth’s, the verse is the verse of Coleridge, and having in very early youth produced this dignified and novel flower, Bryant did not try to blossom into anything different, but went on cultivating the Coleridge-Wordsworth hybrid down to the days of Rossetti and of Villanelles. But Wordsworth and Coleridge had not stayed at the “Mont Blanc” and “Tintern Abbey” point. They went on advancing, developing, altering, and declining to the end of their days. The consequence is that the specimens of the Bryant variety do not strike us as remarkably like the general work of Wordsworth or of Coleridge…. He is exquisitely polished, full of noble suavity and music, but his irreparable fault is to be secondary, to remind us always of his masters first, and only on reflection of himself.

  Of Bryant’s rank and merits as a poet there is, and for some time to come is likely to be, a great diversity of opinion. A partial explanation of this may be found in the fact that the most enduring qualities of his verse are readily appreciated by only a comparatively restricted class even of those who read poetry. He was essentially an ethical poet. His inspiration was always from above. In the flower, in the stream, in the tempest, in the rainbow, in the snow, in everything about him, nature was always telling him something new of the goodness of God and framing excuses for the frail and the erring. His verses are the record of these lessons as far as he apprehended and could express them. The number who comprehend the full force of them at a single reading, however, is comparatively small. Every one of his verses will bear the supreme test of a work of literary art, which discloses a wider horizon and new merits at each successive perusal…. As water in crystallizing excludes all foreign ingredients, and out of acids, alkalies, and other solutions yields a crystal of perfect purity and sweetness, so his thoughts in passing into verse seemed to separate themselves from everything that was transient or vulgar. His poems have come to us as completely freed from every trace of what is of the earth earthy as if, like St. Luke’s pictures, they had received their finishing touch from the angels.

  My first romantic love of nature was awakened by the poems of William Cullen Bryant, then in the zenith of their popularity. There was something tangible in the pictures that he drew; his themes pointed out the charms of the woods and the mountains and the fields, which were all about me—before my eyes on every side. The distinguished poet was our neighbor, or, to be more exact, his birthplace was on a picturesque hillside in sight of my own birthplace, and he usually came to the old homestead every Summer. When a boy, he attended school with my father, and I had asked so many questions about how he looked in his youth and what he said and did, that I almost fancied I had actually seen him write “Thanatopsis.”

  His vocabulary was limited; his poetry was frigid. To be stirred by it is, in the words of Lowell, “like being stirred up by the very North Pole.” It had little capacity for growth, and was at its best before the poet was out of his teens. But it had great virtues. Written in classic English, imbued with great dignity of thought and feeling, pervaded with what Wordsworth has called the “religion of the woods”—the devout and solemn reverence for the invisible powers of nature—its manly reserve and repose elevated not only his countrymen’s ideals of literary excellence, but their ideals of life as well.

  Mr. Bryant was a wonderful worker; not only was his editorial industry remarkable, but his contributions to our American literature, both in prose and verse, afford abundant evidence of the fact. He was an accomplished student of the literature of many languages, and while his translations from other tongues are so felicitous that his fellow-master, Longfellow, praised some of his Spanish translations as rivalling the originals in beauty, yet his own verse is as free from the merely literary influence or reminiscence as the pure air of his native hills from the perfume of exotics. His last considerable poem, “The Flood of Years,” but echoes in its meditative flow the solemn cadences of “Thanatopsis.”

  Bryant is one of the few poets of genuine power whose poetic career shows no advance. The first arrow he drew from his quiver was the best, and with it he made his longest shot; many others he sent in the same direction, but they all fell behind the first. This accounts for the singleness and the depth of the impression he has left; he stands for two or three elementals, and thereby keeps his force unscattered. He was not, indeed, wholly insensible to the romanticist stirrings of his time, as such effusions as “The Damsel of Peru,” “The Arctic Lover,” and “The Hunter’s Serenade,” bear witness. He wrote several pieces about Indians—not the real red men, but those imaginary noble savages, possessors of all the primitive virtues, with whom our grandfathers peopled the American forests. He wrote strenuously in behalf of Greek emancipation and against slavery, but even here, though the subject lay very near his heart, he could not match the righteous vehemence of Whittier, or Lowell’s alternate volleys of sarcasm and rebuke. Like Antæus, Bryant ceased to be powerful when he did not tread his native earth.

  Bryant’s genius was at its best in passages imaginatively descriptive of external loveliness, rather than in those expressive of moods and feelings when the spirit is aspiring or analytically reflective. His true strength lay in his powers of vivid delineation, in the art which could bring distinctly to mind, with a few graphic strokes, the rushing vehemence of the stream or the waterfall; the boundless stretch of the prairie magnificence; the terrors of the hurricane, no less than the gentle sweetness of the evening wind, as it “rocks the little wood-bird in his nest,” or “curls the still waters bright with stars,” or goes forth as “God’s blessing breathed upon the fainting earth.” His genius lingers lovingly over the splendours of mountain and valley scenery, as if at home with the sublimities of the “beetling verge” where storm and lightning “have tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base dashed them into fragments;” or where “upon the meadow’s breast the shadow of the thicket lies.” With these and similar scenes of natural charm Bryant’s poetry abounds; but with regard to that mysterious land of spiritual longing and contemplation towards which the loftiest thoughts of man turn wistfully, his conceptions are limited and prescribed. Although his poetry is full of reference to the highest subjects which can engage the mind, these are all viewed from one standpoint. His spirit is enlisted on the affirmative side of the problem, and in every line that he has written we feel the influence of the faith of one who believes in Divine goodness ruling the universe.

  It is as a poet, and especially by a few distinctive compositions, that Bryant will be most widely and deeply held in remembrance…. Bryant’s venerable aspect in old age—with erect form, white hair, and flowing snowy beard—gave him a resemblance to Homer; and there was something Homeric about his influence upon the literature of his country, in the dignity with which he invested the poetic art and the poet’s relation to the people.

  Bryant’s poems inevitably bring Wordsworth to our minds, yet it seems unfair to Bryant’s talents to measure their increase by comparison with the fruits of Wordsworth’s genius. Bryant’s lot took him to the city, to newspapers and daily cares, while Wordsworth sauntered contemplative over Helvellyn and along the margin of Windermere. Great poetry has never been written by a man who was not able to give to it his concentrated thought and his whole heart. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, all the great poets of England have given undivided allegiance to poetry. Bryant could not do so, and his poems bear the marks of his involuntary disloyalty. A poet must be judged by his achievement alone. Bryant’s verses, except at their best, show a lack of art. They are a little undisciplined; they betray truancy to the classics.

  Bryant’s poetry is stately, lofty, clear. A man of practiced self-control, who from childhood to the day of his death rose early, ate sparingly, exercised regularly, his verse is equally subject to rule. No impetuous measures broke from his pen. Respect for law and order, personal reserve, and coldness of temperament are so far from being the traditional make-up of a poet that it is no wonder the critics are puzzled.

  By reason of his long-continued life, Bryant seems nearer to our own day than, as a poet, he really is. Historically he must be remembered as the first of American poets,—first in poetry as Irving was first in one form of prose, and Cooper in another. The body of his poetic work is small, and the greater portion of it is manifestly destined to be forgotten.

  Above and beyond all, he was nature’s evangelist to man. He caught the spirit of the messages whispered by the trees, sung by the river and chanted by the sea. Trees and flowers, the forest and the prairies, the clouds, the sky and the stars, the sea, the tides, and the winds, the thunder-storm and the hurricane, spoke to him a “various language,” which he interpreted to his fellow-men.

  As one looks through his work, however, one is apt to wonder whether, even if his life had been destitute of 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.

  Bryant was not of a cold nature, but, on the contrary, a very passionate one, which he had learned to control perfectly, and I always had an impression from certain expressions in his poems that he had, in the past, suffered greatly from uncontrolled passion, and had found the necessity of great restraint…. I think that the apparent coldness in his verse was really due to his having learned to avoid passionate expression as treacherous, and liable to lead to repentance. His only safety was in the most supreme self-control.