Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB
[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Stand in their beauty by.

1 These are lines of whose great rhythmical beauty it is scarcely possible to speak too highly.' (POE.)

2 Among the minor poems of Bryant, none has so much impressed me as the one which he entitles 'June.' The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuous - nothing could be more melodious. The poem 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. And if, in the remaining compositions which I shall introduce to you, there be more or less of a similar tone always apparent, let me remind you that (how or why we know not) this certain taint of sadness is inseparably connected with all the higher manifestations of true Beauty. (POE.)

[blocks in formation]

AY, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath!

When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf, And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,

And the year smiles as it draws near its death.

Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay In the gay woods and in the golden air, Like to a good old age released from care, Journeying, in long serenity, away.

In such a bright, late quiet, would that I

3 Bryant died in the month of June (1878), and was buried in the beautiful village cemetery at Roslyn, Long Island.

[blocks in formation]

My spirit yearns to bring

[blocks in formation]

And then shall I behold

The lost ones back- yearns with desire Him, by whose kind paternal side I sprung,

intense,

[blocks in formation]

And her, who, still and cold, Fills the next grave the beautiful and

20

1828.

All passage save to those who hence de

[blocks in formation]

young.

-

THE EVENING WIND 2

1829.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

1 Compare with this poem Wordsworth's 'To the Small Celandine,' and others.

Notice that Bryant addresses his verses to a distinctively American flower; as later he chooses an American bird, the bobolink, for the subject of a poem which is to be contrasted with Wordsworth's To the Skylark,' To the Green Linnet,' etc. Bryant gives the reason for this choice in a letter to his brother John, February 19, 1832: I saw some lines by you to the skylark. Did you ever see such a bird? Let me counsel you to draw your images, in describing Nature, from what you observe around you, unless you are professedly composing a description of some foreign country, when, of course, you will learn what you can from books. The skylark is an English bird, and an American who has never visited Europe has no right to be in raptures about it.'

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

and successful warfare which he kept up at the head of a few daring followers, that they sent an officer to remonstrate with him for not coming into the open field and fighting 'like a gentleman and a Christian.' (BRYANT.)

On the occasion of a reception given to Bryant in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1873, one of the speakers said that the Song of Marion's Men' had been sung in many a Southern bivouac, and warmed the soldier's heart at many a Confederate camp-fire.' See Godwin's Life of Bryant, vol. ii, pp. 330, 331.

2 In the edition of Bryant's poems published in England in 1832, and edited by Washington Irving, this line was changed to

The foeman trembles in his camp. Considerable discussion over this change arose later in America, of which a full account can be found in Bigelow's Life of Bryant, pp. 129–139.

[blocks in formation]

The Prairies. I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight

Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch,

In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows
fixed,

1 See the account of Bryant's first visit to the West, in Godwin's Life, vol. i, pp. 282-286. Especially significant is a passage from Bryant's letter to Richard H. Dana: 'I have seen the great West, where I ate corn and hominy, slept in log houses, with twenty men, women, and children in the same room. . . . At Jacksonville, where my two brothers live, I got on a horse, and travelled about a hundred miles to the northward over the immense prairies, with scattered settlements, on the edges of the groves. These prairies, of a soft, fertile garden soil, and a smooth undulating surface, on which you may put a horse to full speed, covered with high, thinly growing grass, full of weeds and gaudy flowers, and destitute of bushes or trees, perpetually brought to my mind the idea of their having been once cultivated. They looked to me like the fields of a race which had passed away, whose enclosures and habitations had decayed, but on whose vast and rich plains, smoothed and levelled by tillage, the forest had not yet encroached.'

[blocks in formation]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »