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By Root 16158 0

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 Waterfowl” is very beautiful, but like “Thanatopsis,” owes a great deal to its completeness and pointed termination.

“Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids!” will strike every poet as the truest poem written by Bryant. It is richly ideal.

“June” is sweet and perfectly well modulated in its rhythm, and inexpressibly pathetic. It serves well to illustrate my previous remarks about passion in its connexion with poetry. In “June” there is, very properly, nothing of the intense passion of grief, but the subdued sorrow which comes up, as if perforce, to the surface of the poet’s gay sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul, while there is yet a spiritual elevation in the thrill.

And what if cheerful shouts at noon

Come, from the village sent,

Or songs of maids beneath the moon

With fairy laughter blent?

And what if, in the evening light,

Betrothed lovers walk in sight

Of my low monument?

I would the lovely scene around

Might know no sadder sight nor sound.

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.

The thoughts here belong to the highest class of poetry, the imaginative-natural, and are of themselves sufficient to stamp their author a man of genius.

I copy at random a few passages of similar cast, inducing a similar conviction. ­

The great heavens

Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,

A nearer vault and of a tenderer blue

Than that which bends above the eastern hills. . . . . .

Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked and wooed

In a forgotten language and old tunes

From instruments of unremembered form,

Gave the soft winds a voice. . . . . .

Breezes of the south,

That toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,

And pass the prairie hawk, that, poised on high,

Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not. . . . .

On the breast of earth

I lie, and listen to her mighty voice —

A voice of many tones sent up from streams

That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen;

Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air;

From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day,

And hollows of the great invisible hills,

And sands that edge the ocean, stretching far

Into the night — a melancholy sound! . . . . .

All the green herbs

Are stirring in his breath; a thousand flowers

By the road side and the borders of the brook,

Nod gayly to each other.

[There is a fine “echo of sound to sense” in “the borders of the brook,” etc.; and in the same poem from which these lines are taken, (”The Summer Wind,”) may be found two other equally happy examples, e. g.

For me, I lie

Languidly in the shade, where the thick turf,

Yet virgin from the kisses of the sun,

Retains some freshness.

And again —

All is silent, save the faint

And interrupted murmur of the bee

Settling on the sick flowers, and then again

Instantly on the wing.

I resume the imaginative extracts.]

Paths, homes, graves, ruins from the lowest glen

To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air. . . . . .

And the blue gentian flower that in the breeze

Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last. . . . . .

A shoot of that old vine that made

The nations silent in the shade. . . . . .

But ‘neath yon crimson tree,

Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,

Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,

Her flush of maiden shame. . . . . . ­

The mountains that infold,

In their wild sweep, the colored landscape round,

Seem groups of giant kings in purple and gold

That guard the enchanted