Certainly, he could not have been refuted by citing any of the poets of whom I have spoken; but we have now come to a poet who could be triumphantly produced to falsify the statement. In William Cullen Bryant, America produced her first poet of distinction, the first who has some pretension to originality. Griswold tells us that when Thanatopsis, Bryant's first characteristic poem, was submitted to Dana, then editor of the North American Review, Dana and one or two critics whom he consulted were satisfied that a poem so finished and so noble could not have been written by an American. Their wonder was, no doubt, increased when they learned that it was not only written by an American, but by an American scarcely out of his teens.

It is no figure of speech to say that the American muse found her first voice in Bryant. He has been called a disciple of Wordsworth; it has been pointed out that his favourite measures have all been borrowed from ours; that in Young's Night Thoughts and in Dyer's Ruins of Rome had been sounded the note which he struck with more power and impressiveness in the poems peculiarly characteristic of him, and that his blank verse is but a variation of the blank verse of English masters. This is true only in the sense in which it is true that, but for Ennius we should never have had Virgil, and that, but for his classical predecessors in ancient Greece and Rome and in modern Italy, we should never have had Milton. Bryant's relation to Wordsworth may be more accurately indicated by calling him, in virtue of his own native genius, and not by virtue of imitation, the "American Wordsworth "; his relation to

Young and Dyer, by distinguishing between what is accidental and what is essential; and of his blank verse it may be said, with literal truth, that in structure and rhythm it is his own. Nature, and Nature only, was his inspirer and teacher; and pure and simple and wholesome as herself was her disciple and prophet. From his Puritan ancestors, he had inherited his moral temper and cast of mind, his purity, his simplicity, his earnestness, his love of liberty, his reverent piety, his profound seriousness; and with all this some good genius had blended the aesthetic temperament, and bestowed on him the gifts of the poet. And so he went out among the wonders and beauties of the New World, "the rolling prairies,"

under

The gardens of the Desert,

The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name,

The thick roofs

Of green, and stirring branches all alive
And musical with birds that sing and sport

In wantonness of spirit, while, below,

The squirrel, with rais'd paws and form erect,
Chirps merrily;

through the great solitudes with their

Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers

They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds,

And birds that scarce have learn'd the fear of man,
and sliding reptiles of the ground

Startlingly beautiful;

or heard from

Dim woods the aged past

Speak solemnly;

or stood and gazed on

The hills

Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun: the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between:
The venerable woods, rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste;

or lay and listened to Earth's 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.

In his nature poems, there is at times an almost magical note, as in the first two stanzas of The Water Fowl:

Whither, 'midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,

As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

And how fine are the lines in the next stanza but

one:

There is a Power, whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,

The desert and illimitable air,

Lone wandering, but not lost.

And The Gladness of Nature pulses with the ecstasy which it describes. "O Fairest of the Rural

Maids" may remind us a little too closely of Wordsworth, but this exquisite lyric, as well as The Evening Wind, could only have been written by one whom Nature had initiated. Mr. Stedman speaks of the "elemental quality" of Bryant's poetry: it is a most happy expression, as any one will feel after reading such poems as The Prairies, A Winterpiece, The Evening Wind, The Hunter of the Prairies, Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, The Painted Cup, A Hymn to the Sea, A Forest Hymn, A Hymn to the North Sea, Among the Trees, A River by Night.

But to this exquisite susceptibility to the power and charm of nature, and to this inspired faculty for catching and rendering them, he brought other qualities. He was not, like our own Wordsworth, a profound philosopher, but he was deeply impressed with the mystery, solemnity, and sadness of life, and also with the momentous importance of the moral responsibilities resting on all on whom the gift of it has been conferred. This element is sometimes distinct from his nature studies, and sometimes blends itself with them. It is seen in its distinctness in such poems as the Hymn to Death, The Past, Life, The Journey of Life, The Crowded Street, The Future Life, Blessed are They that Mourn, and that noble poem, The Return of Youth; but it is when blended with his nature studies that it is most impressive. In what majestic threnody does he contrast the eternity of nature and the transitoriness of man in Thanatopsis, and again in The Fountain, and again, with tenderer pathos, in The Rivulet. With what eloquence does he enlist Nature in the service of

man's spiritual and moral instruction, as in the Forest Hymn, The Old Man's Gospel, and an Evening Revelry; or make her bring balm for the wounds of life and solace and comfort, in such poems as the Walk at Sunset, Green River, Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson, Lines on Revisiting the Country, A Summer Wind. In the beautiful City Hymn he leads her from her solitudes to irradiate the sordid and crowded life of the street and of the mart, while in June and The Burial-place he would have her wreathe the dishonours of death with her loveli

ness.

The dominant note in Bryant is, certainly, threnody; but it is threnody without gloom. He had inherited from his Puritan ancestors the faith that illumines life and looks through death, and it never fails him. To his Puritanism is probably owing also his absolute freedom from any traces of a mystic or pantheistic tendency in his treatment of Nature. His diction, his style, his versification, if the result of the study of English models, are, in the main, his own, and seem to be the spontaneous utterance of what they convey. Never when he is at his best were conception and expression in more absolute harmony. It has been observed that his vocabulary is a limited one, and that the measures in which he writes were few and simple; the reason is, because the sphere in which his genius moved is limited, and because he only employed such measures as were most appropriate for his few and simple themes. It is as difficult to associate art with his poetry as it would be to associate art with the vibrations of an Aeolian lyre.