I know, I know I should not see

The season's glorious show,

Nor would its brightness shine for me,
Nor its wild music flow;

But if around my place of sleep,

The friends I love should come to weep,

They might not haste to go.

Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom,

Should keep them lingering by my tomb."--Pp. 112-14.

"A Walk at Sunset" is in the spirit of a noble lyric composed after a summer shower, in the chambers of the sun, as he catches glimpses of the earth in her heightened beauty. But on the noble topics of freedom and patriotism, Bryant is truly American. Here he is nobler than the old Greeks, and he speaks with power and sublimity. Witness his " Sonnet to William Tell:"

"Chains may subdue the feeble spirit, but thee,
TELL, of the iron heart! they could not tame!
For thou wert of the mountains; they proclaim
The everlasting creed of liberty.

That creed is written on the untrampled snow

Thundered by torrents which no power can hold,
Save that of God when he sends forth his cold,

And breathed by winds that through the free heavens blow.
Thou, while thy prison walls were dark around,

Didst meditate the lesson Nature taught,

And to thy brief captivity was brought

A vision of Switzerland unbound,

The bitter cup they mingled, strengthened thee

For thy great work to set thy country free."--P. 160.

The poem, or rather the part of a poem, called "Antiquity of Freedom," deserves mention for its high spirit and elegant verse, though it cannot be quoted here. But there must be space to insert the spirited tribute to William Leggett, which is one of the noblest offerings of friendship to sterling worth and brave honesty yet written, and it ought to have a much wider circulation than even many others in the volume have had:

"The earth may ring from shore to shore,

With cehoes of a glorious name,

But he, whose loss our tears deplore,

Has left behind him more than fame.

"For when the death-frost came to lie
On Leggett's warm and mighty heart,
And quench his bold and friendly eye,
His spirit did not all depart.

"The words of fire that from his pen
Were flung upon the fervid page
Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
Amid a cold and coward age.

"His love of truth, too warm, too strong,

For hope or fear to chain or chill,

His hate of tyranny and wrong,

Burn in the breasts he kindled still."-P. 279.

A martyr's life is not lost when his death awakes such echoes as these to reverberate forever among the literature of a nation; nor has a patriot lived in vain if his labors have prompted any one to build for him so noble a monument.

How like a pæan after a glorious victory do the ideas and cadences of that noble song, "The Battle Field," strike on the ear and thrill the soul! It is the jubilate of joy and hope, accompanied by the spirit-stirring notes of a whole orchestra. How sweet its tones, how noble its sentiments, how grand its thoughts, so hopeful of right, so defiant of wrong, so uncompromisingly ready to live in misery and disgrace, in toil and suffering, if but the true and the good triumph! The ninth verse is more quoted than almost any other verse of poetry in the language, and yet it is scarcely better than any other in the poem. It only makes a point. After four stanzas descriptive of a quiet pastoral scene, where a battle was once fought, he says:

"Soon rested those who fought; but thou

Who minglest in a harder strife
For truths which men receive not now,
Thy warfare only ends with life.
"A friendless warfare! lingering long
Through weary day and weary year.
A wild and many-weaponed throng
Hang on thy front, and flank, and rear.
"Yet nerve thy spirit to the proof,
And blench not at thy chosen lot;
The timid good may stand aloof,

The sage may frown, but faint thou not.

"Nor heed the shaft too surely cast,
The foul and hissing bolt of scorn;
For with thy side shall dwell at last,
The victory of endurance born.

"Truth crush'd to earth shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But error wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies amid her worshipers.

"Yea, though thou lie upon the dust,
When they who helped thee flee in fear,
Die full of hope and manly trust,

Like those who fell in battle here.

"Another hand thy sword shall wield,
Another hand the standard wave,

Till from the trumpet's mouth is pealed

The blast of triumph o'er thy grave.”--Pp. 260-2.

Human affections, as has already been said, do not appear so frequently in Bryant's poetry as descriptions of natural scenery and moralizings upon them. But these are by no means overlooked. Their silent unspoken influence, and their felt presence is everywhere. "Robert of Lincoln" is the best specimen of the domestic or conjugal affection in the book. It is a beauty, and the only really good description of the very worthy and agreeable gentleman whom it describes, and who is such a favorite in all New England, and such an addition to the elegance and delights of a rural cottage or hamlet. It should be taught to all little children and repeated by all large ones till we act in spirit.

One mighty thought reigns in all these poems, as it should in all true poetry, that man, under the tuition of nature and the Spirit of God, is daily growing better. This thought is the burden of the first and longest poem in the volume, entitled "The Ages." The plan of it (for it is not a poem to quote from) is this: Observing the death of the good and the young, we naturally turn to the lengthened days of the honored sage, and call those "ages holy." But we must not despair, for death strikes the wicked too, and if we look through nature we shall see that

"Eternal Love doth keep

In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep"

History teaches that mankind are better now than in darker times :
"That Error's monstrous shapes from earth are driven;
They fade, they fly, but Truth survives their flight;
Earth has no shades to quench that beam of heaven;
Each ray that shone, in early time to light
The faltering footstep in the path of right,
Each gleam of clearer brightness shed to aid
In man's maturer day his bolder sight,
All blended, like the rainbow's radiant braid,

Pour yet, and still shall pour, the blaze that cannot fade."

And so he closes with auguring a glorious day for our beloved country, which cannot fall but by the hands of her own children. Mr. Bryant manages this intractable verse (the Spenserian) with as much ease as the common doggerel of the ballad; and although its reach of melody is too long, and its rhymes too far apart, and often

too indistinct, for the delight of ordinary readers, yet it is as noble as the oratorios of Handel or Haydn. It is not likely soon to become popular. This kind of verse, like the measure of many of the hymns of Charles Wesley, needs an education to understand and appreciate it.

Mr. Bryant has written nothing in these poems that can have an impure or hurtful tendency. He has, since his almost infantile writings, scarcely attempted satire at all, and there is nothing of the broad and doubtful sort of humor or caricature in the whole collection. Not a syllable is here of which virtue herself could complain, and nothing that tends to make us laugh at or undervalue our fellow men; but much to make the soul strong in opposing error, in bravely battling for truth, and in patiently waiting the revelation of a brighter and a better day for our afflicted race. His thoughts are chaste, generally noble, never low or commonplace, always tending to improve those who read. They lead you to the pure air and grand scenery of the mountain top, not so much that you may look down upon the glorious sights of the earth beneath, as that you may be strengthened by the healthful exercise, and may get a broader view of the illimitable heaven and numberless stars above your head. His metaphors and similes are easily suggested, and actually illustrate his subject and deepen the impression on the mind, as well as add beauty to the language; and while there is no attempt to seek originality in phrase or in construction, there is such a newness and freshness about the thought as pleases more than startling antitheses or elaborate modernisms. The verses and stanzas are so harmoniously constructed that all their hinges seem to be golden, and even the blank verse often moves with as liquid a flow as some of Whittier's fiery rhymes. There is a polish about these poems that but few Englishmen have been willing to wait for. It is probably impossible to tell how much time and labor this excellent finish has cost; though we can guess it by remembering, that in fifty years almost we have less than one hundred and fifty poems, containing not much to exceed six thousand lines. Here are less than one hundred and fifty lines a year on the average, an example to be imitated by poets and prose writers as well. The words are most admirably chosen to express sweetness, grace, and elegance, or energy, patience and hopefulness, qualities for which the poems are especially distinguished. They are easy to be understood, definite in sense, and used with great precision; in sound they are musical, and admirably harmonize with the idea. They are for the most part pure English, with the least intermixture of Latin, about eleven or twelve words in the hundred being of a foreign origin, while Milton, Pope, and Addison

use in their poetry twenty-four nearly, and Burns and Bishop Heber, the most English of all our writers, use eight or ten. It has not been the purpose of this article to quote examples of the beautiful and appropriate use of words and metaphors, or to select the beauties of the volume, so much as to make clear and enforce its noble lessons of love for nature and human progress. Hence the quotations have been longer, and they are often brought in more for their high moral instruction than for their composition or versification. And yet it is believed that no injustice has been done the author on any score.

Perhaps the book should not be dismissed without one word more respecting the illustrations, which do not deserve unqualified praise, though better than most of their kind. A few of them do not illustrate the conception of the piece where they stand, yet the most of them do. There are many landscapes that are almost as much of studies and beauties as the admirable poems they accompany, and we wish for even more of them. The portrait of the author can be read again and again, and will not weary the reader, for its noble brow, its thought-full wrinkles, its sweet mouth yet firm, and its far-seeing eyes, seem to invite friendship and promise instruction, a promise not unfulfilled to him who turns over these pages either to read the text or look at the pictures.

Several of the poems in blank verse, as "The Fountain," "Noon," "An Evening Reverie," and others, we are told, are parts of a larger poem which may yet see the light. Indeed, much of this kind of poetry throughout the volume seems to be intended for such a purpose, or at least it could be readily joined into one great poem on "Nature and her Teachings." Such are "Thanatopsis," "Inscription for a Wood." "A Winter Piece," "Summer Wind," "Earth," "A Hymn of the Sea," "A Rain Dream;" all of which seem made to the same key-notes, or rather appear to be the wellwrought key-stones of arches in a magnificent temple yet to be builded. Possibly Mr. Bryant is now too busy in the great battle for free principles, bequeathed to him by his friend Leggett, to undertake, or, more truly, to finish such a work. But what a noble close of life his might be (for he is only just now sixty-three, entering upon a green and vigorous old age) if, while with one hand he wields the sword in the defense and in the propagation of freedom and truth, he would, with the other, collect these well-wrought and highly polished fragments into one grand poem, that should almost outsing Milton himself, and make for our American poet a monument, a structure built by his own genius, which should last while men admire beautiful words or grand conceptions.