"Life" is rather the poetical conception of the philosopher than of the immortal saint. It is full of beauty nevertheless; and while it seems to lack the religious element of faith, it yet has the anxious tone that inquires for it. Somewhat more definite and hopeful is the desire to "know as we are known" which glows in "The Future Life." "How shall I know thee in the sphere which keeps The disembodied spirits of the dead, "For I shall feel the sting of ceaseless pain In thy serenest eyes the tender thought. "The love that lived through all the stormy past, And deeper grew, and tenderer to the last, "Yet though thou wear'st the glory of the sky, "Shalt thou not teach me, in that calmer home, Thy fit companion in that land of bliss ?"-P. 263, 264. But these are not the subjects on which this poet is most at home. He does not ascend naturally into the dim mysterious regions of the spirit of man, and hear the voice of God's inward inspiration revealing to him the secrets of the soul's eternity, and all the deep meanings of its heart-longings after a higher life when earth has filed, a life not of languid and idle dreamings, but a higher life of doing and ripening by means of vigorous labor, every day and every hour voluntarily undertaken and resolutely gone through. He has looked upon the "visible forms of nature," not upon the invisible realities of the Spirit; and though he sees and describes a splendid significance in those forms, he has not yet conceived, and therefore he cannot paint the sublimity of those realities. He is therefore more Greek than Jew or Christian, and he has the pantheistic spirit that glows and burns, that kindles and loves when it can feel or see, but which darkens and dies, and cannot be made to burn nor adore, where its intuitions are the only light on which it must depend. low logic and the senses, but not the godlike reason. He can folHence he is tame here compared to what he is when abroad in the fields. With nature he is alive and genial, suggestive and ennobling; but alone with his own spirit, silent and unsocial, bashful and unsatisfactory: so in regard to the subject of Home he is Greek and not English, at least not in the sense in which Cowper and Wordsworth are English. There is no lack of allusion to the home affections, but there are few pictures of home and its heart-softening influences, and that too in the midst of poetry that riots in descriptions of nature, the beauty and suggestive power of which are so much increased by cottagehomes scattered along all her hillsides and valleys. In "The Murdered Traveler," however, is a picture of home, where all the love of wife and children are mingled with that "fond anxiety" which makes "home" one of the most foreboding, yet one of the dearest and sweetest words in the language. The whole piece is inimitable, entirely in the spirit of the old English home-poetry, and yet American in all its scenery and associations: "When spring, to woods and wastes around, The murder'd traveler's bones were found, "But long they look'd, and fear'd, and wept, And dream'd and started as they slept, For joy that he had come."-Pp. 96, 97, 98. After having made the foregoing exceptions there is nothing else to be said in disparagement of these poems, or in abatement of the highest praise that can be bestowed upon them. The topics most often touched upon, and most lovingly sung, are nature and her teachings; freedom and patriotism, with their arousing, exalting influences; human affections and their heart-soothing tendencies, and the grand movements and progressions of the race, gradually bringing on a better time for mankind. In relation to those poems that simply describe nature, and overflow with her delightful moralities, nothing can be found written in English sweeter in spirit and flow of language, or better seeing what ought to be seen, and more admirably expressing it, nor more American in general tone and coloring. Not that Bryant is always to be distinguished from the English poets as an American. There are but few things that would mark these poems as written in America instead of England or Scotland; but there are some such things. Such is "March." No one but an American, who had loved the "sugar season," and had helped to gather the "sap," or "sugar water;" who had enjoyed "sugaring off," and been one of the party of youths who poured the delicious "wax" upon the new-fallen snow, could have written such a poem; and though not a word is said of these things, yet the poem smells" of them, as some men's poems are said to smell of the lamp. "The stormy March is come at last, With wind, and cloud, and changing skies, I hear the rushing of the blast, That through the valley flies. "Ah, passing few are they who speak, "For thou, to northern lands again "Then sing aloud the gushing rills, "The year's departing beauty hides But in thy sternest frown abides "Thou bring'st the hope of those calm skies, When the wide bloom on earth that lies, Seems of a brighter world than ours."-Pp. 67, 68. Of "A Winter Piece" it may be said that while its scenery is American, it might have been written by a foreigner as well as by a native. Not so of "A Forest Hymn," which has a depth of grandeur in thought and a finish in diction truly admirable. Such a hymn could have been conceived by no one not familiar from infancy with the thick foliage and tall trunks of our primeval forests. It would be breaking a dew-drop to quote a fragment from this universal favorite the proper translation into words of the mysteriously murmured music which that mighty old harper, the wind, is always playing upon the branches and leaves of the ancient woods. The same love for woods, and the same joyous labor to describe them, shows itself in the "Hunter's Serenade :" "Or wouldst thou gaze at tokens Of ages long ago— Our old oaks stream with mosses, And sprout with mistletoe; And mighty vines, like serpents climb, And trunks, o'erthrown for centuries, And in the great savanna, The solitary mound, Built by the elder world, o'erlooks The loneliness around."-P. 162. Among the best and most suggestive poems in the whole collection are "The Gladness of Nature," "The Death of the Flowers," "A Summer Ramble," and "To the Fringed Gentian." There is the same difficulty in quoting from these that there would be in exhibiting a single petal of a rose, or in showing the lock of hair, to prove or to exemplify the beauty of the queen of flowers or the loveliness of woman. There is a completeness and a oneness about many of these poems, that proves them to have been made at one "heat," as a smith would say, or rather born, or made as are the rain-drops, and rounded into perfection by some almost active principle of self-balancing coherence; and the high polish and finish which they display, shows how repeatedly they have been retouched. These five verses, from the opening of the "Ramble," are given as a specimen of unsurpassed description: "The quiet August noon has come, “And mark yon soft white clouds that rest The cattle on the mountain's breast "O how unlike those merry hours, In early June, when Earth laughs out, "When in the grass sweet voices talk, From every moss-cup of the rock, "But now a joy too deep for sound, A peace no other season knows, Hushes the heavens and wraps the ground, The blessing of supreme repose."-Pp. 153, 154. "The "Wind," however, is the thing that Bryant most loves to play with of all the sights, and sounds, and agencies of nature, and it is really wonderful how frequently and how variously he returns to it; how he makes us feel its cool breath and inhale its aerial life and divine fragrance; how he makes it talk with and inspirit us, and how familiarly he associates with it all grand and ennobling ideas and emotions. He writes about it in almost all forms of meter, and by almost all possible names, saving the Latin and Greek terms zephyr, boreas, and the like, for which he most commendably seems to have no fondness. First in order, then, we have "The West Wind," a gem of beauty in the ballad style: "Beneath the forest's skirt I rest, Whose branching pines rise dark and high, Among the thread-like foliage sigh. "Thou wind of joy, and youth, and love, Spirit of the new-awakened year! The sun in his blue realm above Smooths a bright path when thou art here."--P. 36. "The Summer Wind," in blank verse, a fragment, probably of the same great design from which "Noon" is also taken, has a delightful rhythm and a pleasing movement as truly bewitching as rhyme. "After a Tempest" is in the Spenserian stanza, and paints a most lovely scene of the quiet and hopeful hereafter, when all winds and passions shall be at war no more. It describes a lovely afternoon, when the winds were laid and the rains were withdrawn; the sunlight glimmered on the rain-drops still clinging to the leaves; the birds flew abroad, and the squirrels were chattering; insects were on the wing, "And darted up and down the butterfly, It closes with thoughts of the great peace yet to be. Then "The 'Winds," is a poem in a stanza very remarkable for its easy flow, vigorous expression, and terse condensation. Its scope is exactly the opposite of "After a Tempest," and its moralizing alludes to the struggle for freedom yet to come. "Ye winds, ye unseen currents of the air! |