Bryant's Permanent Contribution to Literature

IF such a mortal man be born a poet, if one of the seraphim have touched his mouth with a live coal from off the altar, lie is a comforter of men, and out of reach of praise. Yet a man may be a poet and have simpler duties before him. He will give utterance to those feelings, the common chattels of the heart, which men have, and know they have, but cannot put into words. When Cupid hovered about Psyche in the dark, she divined his presence, she felt his power, she knew his grace, but she needed the definiteness of sight, the certainty of touch, the god in bodily form. Her story is the allegory of human weakness and desire. We need a poet to tell us what we feel. The utterance of the dumb poetry which is in us is for those poets who act intermediate between us and the powers that endowed us with it.

It is essential to real expression of that dumb poetry in us that the poet should be in close relation with us. This nearness is almost always found in our American poets. It is natural that it should be so. A poet is affected by the character and habits of the people about him: his thought is colored by their thoughts, his attitude towards the great facts of life is suggested by theirs. In his turn he acts upon his neighbors, and a certain similarity of thought and feeling is established. We see in Keats the joy of Englishmen in English life; in Shelley, the aspirations of Englishmen; in Byron, their discontent; in Wordsworth, their contemplative asceticism. Yet it is not always so. Consider Ariosto, a great poet beyond dispute. In his Mad Orlando he takes so fantastic a plot, he adopts so brilliantly artificial a style, he displays such ironical contempt of life, that it is impossible that he should be in harmony with the serious life of common men. Our poets more than most poets — and this characteristic may be their chief merit — utter the sentiments of their fellows. They do not affect to consider themselves as men set apart, but endeavor to express the feelings of the people among whom they live.

This intimate interdependence of poet and people is very obvious in our best known group of poets. Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and in their several ways Poe and Whitman, utter the common human feelings that enter the hearts of common men. This is particularly true of Bryant. He says what a large body of people feel, understand, and hold in sympathy. This trait in his poetry is the result of his character, which is essentially American. If we take as the two ideal types of our American character George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, we are struck by a change from the repose and self-control of Washington to the emotion and selfcontrol of Lincoln. This difference between the two serves fairly to illustrate the tendency of our American type. Bryant is an excellent specimen of the earlier. He was calm, intelligent, selfrespecting, abounding in common sense, contemplative, gentle, peaceful, almost austere. He was like the country in which he was born. Hampshire County, Massachusetts, his birthplace, is in sight of the Berkshire Hills. If Bryant’s verses were to be turned into meadow, hill, dale, and river, we should have almost the counterpart of western Massachusetts. It is somewhat significant that his two best poems, Thanatopsis and the lines To a Waterfowl, were written there, in his early youth, before he had had experience of the greater emotions and incidents of life. It is on them that his fame chiefly rests, and it is they that best indicate the characteristics of his talents. Early in his long life they gave him public distinction, and at its close they still were his best titles to honor.

When Thanatopsis was published, the youth of Boston and New York were struck with surprise. A consideration of death came to them like an intellectual creative thought. They were like children of few years, to whom life and immortality are the same, who have no conception of death. These readers had a vague notion in the backs of their minds that death was a subject for philosophy, for the Greek drama ; but that they, men of action, citizens of a free republic, separated by an ocean from Europe, rich in enterprise, invention, and machinery, resting upon a written constitution, and electing to the presidency a Jefferson and a Jackson, should stop to ponder upon death, was to them astounding. If Death had come into the poem like Slippered Pantaloon with his Scythe, mowing down the Fairest Flowers, and scattering the Passions, “ baneful band,”they would not have heeded ; they would have classified the poem as poetry, and would have gone on their way rejoicing. But Thanatopsis came with solemnity : it was simple as the Bible ; it suggested no thought beyond the natural compass of their minds ; it gave the earth, the earth of New England, which they themselves trod, so hard to the plough, so stubborn to the harrow, an interest that it had never had before. They were touched and paused to read it, and to read it again, as a man hurrying by a church hears the organ, stops, pauses to catch the voice of the congregation, and then goes on softly, thinking.

Thanatopsis is a very extraordinary feat for a boy of eighteen years. Its language shows honest familiarity with the English Bible. Its thoughts are elevated, its manner is quiet and restrained. Dignity and ease, sensibility and selfcommand, stand out conspicuous. But can we read a chapter from the book of Job, and then turn to it and not be aware of a falling off ? Can we set Thanatopsis beside Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and not miss Gray’s wider thoughtfulness, deeper tenderness, and surpassing art ? Can we match it with Lines composed near Tintern Abbey ? No, most assuredly. Thanatopsis does not rank with these great poems, but, it is a noble poem, and disappointing only in this, that it gives promise of a greater excellence, which Bryant never attained.

The lines To a Waterfowl also quickly became famous. Young Americans had never thought very much about waterfowl. Wild ducks were good to set upon the table before a guest, they were hard to shoot, they were not plentiful enough to be articles of commerce, their feathers eked out those from the barnyard in stuffing the best pillows. Young men regarded the wild duck as the Church of England regards it, graciously endowed with life for man to take away, made for him to mar. Bryant thought differently. In later years he was impressed by the fact that the Rev. F. W. Robertson " seemed to amuse himself with naught but killing birds.” Bryant, in his boyhood, felt as Wordsworth felt, that the life of a wild duck was one joyful expression of the spirit of all life. He did not try to reconcile religion and the doctrine that a creature rich in immortal life may take from his feebler fellow creatures all the life they have. He had learned, and he, too, taught the lesson,

He drew a moral from the flight of the waterfowl through “ the desert and illimitable air,” and it was accepted. The doctrine was in harmony with the feelings of the Unitarians. The subject of the poem was therefore peculiarly favorable. The simplicity and delicacy of expression are of great excellence.

Bryant’s poems inevitably bring Wordsworth to our minds, yet it seems unfair to Bryant’s talents to measure their increase by comparison with the fruits of Wordsworth’s genius. Bryant’s lot took him to the city, to newspapers and daily cares, while Wordsworth sauntered contemplative over Helvellyn and along the margin of Windermere. Great poetry has never been written by a man who was not able to give to it his concentrated thought and his whole heart. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, all the great poets of England have given undivided allegiance to poetry. Bryant could not do so, and his poems bear the marks of his involuntary disloyalty. A poet must be judged by his achievement alone. Bryant’s verses, except at their best, show a lack of art. They are a little undisciplined ; they betray truancy to the classics. Great masters of verse — Milton, Spenser, Tennyson, Swinburne — have wrought their poems and labored over them with the care and minuteness of coral insects. Horace has taught all Ids students the great Roman truth that discipline and care conquer the world. His lines march together as the men of the Tenth Legion paraded before Julius Cæsar. The second-best word goes to a court-martial, the superfluous syllable is cast off on the instant. The task of the poet is to learn form, that he may have dominion over matter. Drudgery and slavish service hew out the only road to freedom. Bryant holds so high his independence that he will not submit enough to discipline, and therefore he says, “ The sun was near his set; ” he speaks of “ sylvan lakelet,” and then before that has dribbled out of our memory “ wavelets ” come splashing along. There may be high authority for these expressions, but they were not meet for Bryant’s purposes. This incivility to English that appears in Bryant, seldom, yet too often, is due partly to his willful independence, partly to his lack of training, and also in a measure to his lack of sensitiveness. A man keenly alive to delicate impressions, to “ shadows and sunny glimmerings,” will do one of two things: either he will try and try again until he shall succeed in making his readers partakers of his sensations, or he will forbear; he will not put up with inadequate expression. Wordsworth has willfulness in bountiful abundance, but in those poems which we prize most highly there is the simplicity of perfect expression. This was the result of hard work. Dorothy Wordsworth says somewhere in her journal, “ William has come back tired : he has spent all the day in thinking of an adjective for the cuckoo.”

While most of us, of ourselves, with our feeble capacity for belief, with our lean imagination, in our dreamless days and our prose-ridden nights, do not feel that nature has personality, nevertheless the most hardened among us are compelled so to feel after reading Wordsworth. Then we believe in some attribute of Deity immanent in nature, and we grow conscious of what the Bible names “ the presence of God.” But Bryant only makes us see what he sees, — beautiful inanimate nature, fruitful in suggestion, quick to catch the color of our imaginings, ready to reflect our moods, but at most only tinged with us and painted with our thoughts. Certainly we need to be reminded that beauty lies about us, that pleasures have been scattered thick at our doorsteps, that “ we are too ready with complaint in this fair world of God’s.” Yet this is work of a less degree of excellence than that of drawing aside the veil from the temple of God.

Bryant shows us many, but not all the aspects of nature. His love of nature is simpler than nature. He enjoys her calm, he finds repose in her inaction; he does not enter into all her joyousness, her delicate growths, her childlike activities.

But Bryant falls into seriousness as soon as he is in a wood. So, too, nature’s sorrowful fadings and fallings pass him by unheeded except as he draws a sorrowful inference for man.

We cannot but feel the great difference between Bryant’s poems on nature and those of Wordsworth. In most of Wordsworth’s familiar poems we find this sensitive recognition of nature “ through the veil that seems to hide ” her, — nature, as we would fain believe her, our young virgin mother, a Primavera singing out of the very dust from which our bodies are wrought. In Bryant we find nature is but an echo of himself. High, serene, calm, and sometimes beautiful, she rises like an eidolon of Bryant. Through Wordsworth we learn love and reverence for nature; he teaches us that she will suffer us like little children to come unto her, and we find rest, refreshment, and delight.

In Bryant nature is a patch on a New England hillside. There is much beauty, much tenderness, much room for virtuous reverie and noble thought, but nature for him does not vary with its changing seasons. It is October, sunshine or shade, all the year; there is but one music in the pines, but one rustle in the fallen leaves; the grasses speak in monotone. Sometimes, it is true, Bryant is half conscious of a girlish spirit in nature, as if she were dodging round his subject, too quick to catch. He attempts to lay hold of her, and writes Sella and Little Children of the Snow. But nature, the wood nymph, is denied to him ; She enchants all poets, they all woo her “ on summer eves by haunted stream,” but few hold commerce with her. Few can say: —

Although Bryant does not reveal to us the holy spirit of nature as Wordsworth does, or nature the forest nymph as Theocritus does, or even portray all her outward aspects, he does show the most important significance of nature for us. That light carelessness which some poets have, which from its very lightness is able to catch “ the gay motes that people the sunbeams,” is meet for the holiday time of life, for feast-days and for youth. We have a more abiding need. We need a constant insistence upon the moral law. Our faith is weak; with the bodily eye we cannot always discern how that law prevails in the world about us. The difficulties of belief cannot be overcome without the help of beauty, which bare laws of cause and effect, probable rules for escaping evils, cannot of their own nature put on. We need poets to make that moral law beautiful in our eyes, to “ endue it with heavenly gifts,” to cover it with “ thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls ” or with an authority that we will not question. Whatever man does so deserves well of the people. Bryant, in narrow limits, perhaps, and with uneven powers, has done this for us. Men with need of metaphysical and subtle reasonings, and men too much in the glare of common sense, may not feel the value of his work, but

all these will feel that Bryant has added a touch of poetry to that moral law, has helped to show more clearly a loveliness which our hearts accept as inherent in it, and to show how that moral beauty belongs to Earth, our mother, and is somehow in harmony with the powers that draw the tracery in ferns and frost, and put their colors in the poppy and the dandelion. The Forest Hymn, The Planting of the Apple Tree, The Death of the Flowers, O Fairest of the Rural Maids, Green River, and a number of other poems, incompletely perhaps, and with various degrees of excellence, bear witness to this great service which he has thus rendered to us.

Bryant first read Wordsworth at the age of seventeen. In the Fable for Critics Mr. Lowell says Bryant has “ the advantage that Wordsworth before him has written.” But this is hardly fair. We fail to find any imitation of Wordsworth in Bryant’s best poems. He is a strong man who grows to his full stature of grace by his own natural growth, and not by any artificial graftings or foreign influences. The poem To a Waterfowl is quite different from Wordsworth’s manner. Wordsworth has had many followers. Walter Bagehot said that he had a whole host of sacred imitators ; that Keble translated him for timid women, and Hartley Coleridge for gentle devotees of nature. Bryant was not one of these. His disposition, impelled by the same large causes which moved Wordsworth, led him to the same simple subjects, — to the flowers of the field, and to the waterbrooks which nourish them. Yet the disciples of Wordsworth would lay claim to a larger art, born of a stronger mind and of a wider imagination, in the poems To a Green Linnet, To the Little Celandine, and their fellows. And no one would be quicker than such disciples to admit that a man might be a worthy poet, although unequal to the great Englishman. Hartley Coleridge, no mean judge, once read the Waterfowl to Matthew Arnold, after asking if he wished to hear the best short poem in the English language.

The mention of Hartley Coleridge suggests a comparison with Bryant. Of the two, perhaps Coleridge had the greater poetic sensibility. To him life appeared wrapped in his own fancy. He felt the “ weight of unintelligible things,” and he shrank under an acute consciousness that his native endowments wore inadequate to cope with the unmanageable facts of the world. He sought refuge in Wordsworth, in poetry, in his own musings. Bryant had a strong character : he was perfectly competent to face the world, and to take from Fortune her buffets and rewards with equal thanks. He, too, turned for consolation to Wordsworth, to poetry, and to his own musings. He, too, was of a meditative mind, tinged with religious thought. He, too, had poetic talents of a limited range. Neither had capacity for dramatic expression. If our only knowledge of men came from their poems, we should not know that blood ran red through human veins. “ We have too many poems by Lord Byron,” said Bryant. Neither Bryant nor Hartley Coleridge had the ability to write a long poem. Bryant is reported to have said, “ There is no such thing as a long poem ; ” his theory was that poems such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy are strung upon a thread of verse which serves to hold the attention of the reader over the interpoetical spaces. Bryant did not have the gift of lyrical expression to as high a degree as Hartley Coleridge. In fact he has left no songs, though he has given that name to one or two short poems. Neither poet seems to have had much sense of humor. Yet, with a certain similarity in their native gifts, there was such an immense difference between their characters that it is hard to think of them together. Both were meditative, moderate, high-minded men, given to contemplation, but the difference in their characters has rendered entirely unlike the matter in their verse. Bryant had repose, self - restraint, peace, and mastery within narrow limits. Hartley Coleridge was sick at heart, self-distrustful, appealing for help. It is a matter of temperament which of the two one prefers. One man likes Coleridge’s sonnets better, another Bryant’s poems.

To a poet as a poet, except in so far as the lack may prevent achievement, character, in the usual meaning of the word, is not essential. But as men are made without nice heed of logical necessities, they set a value upon a man’s poetry in accordance, in large measure, with his character. This habit they justify by saying that the most necessary element in poetry is sincerity; that that poetry cannot be sincere which is not after the pattern of a man’s character, and therefore, however delightful may be the sequence of words, the sway of rhythm, or the ring of rhyme, words not sincere are but tinkling cymbals and profit nothing. The juster method would seem to be to judge words by themselves ; they lie before us, open, unconcealed, self-revealing, whereas a man’s character is shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. Howbeit, it is certain that the high character of a poet is of great consequence to the people among whom he lives. It is a constant proof of the spiritual effect of lofty thoughts and of the truth of poetry. It strengthens our belief in refinement, in self-sacrifice, in nobility of action and of aims. It brings our hearts closer to our minds ; it shows the nearness of poetry and religion. All this Bryant has helped to do. His calm, self-contained, noble character shines in all his poetry, and he has well and faithfully given a bright example of a virtuous man. It is said that

This gift they vouchsafed to Bryant, and the light of it shines in all his life.

Much stress has been laid upon the ethical nature of Bryant’s poetry, and, as it seems to us, often in the wrong place. It is certain that he was a good man; it is certain that he never wrote a verse that might not with propriety be read to virgins and to boys. These virtues, however, are not enough to give his poetry a high ethical character. Justly to deserve that reputation, poetry should be fit not only for young women and children, but for strong men. That which makes man larger, freer, more sensitive, more aspiring, more tender, quicker to seek whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are just and of good report, that is ethical. That poetry which stimulates our interest in men and women, which quickens our sympathies, which starts our tears and calls out our deepest feelings, is ethical. Byron, if he has broadened and deepened our comprehension of discontent, if he has awakened in us compassion, is an ethical poet. The greatest ethical poet is Shakespeare. No one has given us so noble a conception of humanity as he, or has made us so acquainted with grief or so intimate with human interests. Such is the standard by which to measure a poet’s work. Bryant is didactic ; he dwells upon the pleasure and innocence in nature, in contemplation, in the colors of flowers and the noise of falling waters. Many a man draws his noblest inspiration from these simple outputtings of nature which neither vex nor thwart him. They hinder not his will; they yield to his mood ; they minister to his fancy; they obey his thoughts, and tender a simple fellowship which he has not found elsewhere. This deliverance from temptation, this comfortable solitude, have caused men to believe that by withdrawing from the world they have ascended towards heaven. It is well to encourage and develop such a habit and such a disposition. But contemplation is too narrow a school in which to study ethics. In this generation, when the metaphysical aspects of religion have a less firm foundation in the minds of men, morality is sought, not in communion with Deity, but in coming closer to humanity, and in a world of such beliefs the poet must reckon with them.

We do not find among Bryant’s poems any which stir our sympathies with passion or with joy. After reading every poem he has written, the reader is not richer in any fresh knowledge of mankind. He has learned no more of yearning, of despair, of all the doubts and perplexities that hedge us in. Bryant has told of quiet love, of gentle griefs, of sorrows subdued, of his own pleasure in meadows and brooks, in yellow violet and fringed gentian, in maple leaf and climbing vine ; he has told of the refreshment and succor in reverie and contemplation, in rest from the bustle of cities. This is well. This interests us, it encourages us, it helps us to lead simpler, nobler lives; but are we not become better somewhat at the expense of freedom and generosity ? Are we not become Pharisees ? Do we not take the greater satisfaction that we are not as other men are, eager for vanities, greedy, self-seeking, selfproclaiming fools ? Do we not become richer in self-respect than in charity? Bryant learned his own limitations, and put his talents to usury accordingly. In the simplicity of human feelings, the region of the greatest poetry, he found his most excellent expression, and he wrote Abraham Lincoln, The Flood of Years, and The Death of the Flowers.

It is strange that, good citizen as Bryant was, good American as it is claimed that he was, he had no emotional sympathy with democracy. He lived his boyhood among Federalists, and early was taught disapproval, to use a moderate word, of Jefferson and the Republicans. After he had grown to maturity he became a Democrat in national politics; nevertheless, he never was a real Democrat in any genuine meaning of the word. The sense of emancipation, of room, of freedom, which at the time of his birth had affected men so much in Europe, did not stir his boyhood nor his manhood. Byron, “ with haughty scorn that mocked the smart,” showed through Europe like a fragment of the French Revolution; Shelley preached human liberty ; Wordsworth was moved to “ lyrical ballads.” Across the Channel, Victor Hugo and his disciples took up the cry of equality. On this side of the Atlantic, the ideas of democracy have not affected any of our poets, except Walt Whitman, in an emotional manner, unless we consider the abolition of slavery as an element of democracy. Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, none of them breathed the hot breath of democracy. They were conservative, reasonable men, full of common sense and of respect for the past. Bryant embodied a very useful, profitable, and valiant aspect of democracy, of a kind most valuable to the stability of a nation, but not of a kind that a passionate lover of equality would acknowledge as democratic. Bryant was a believer in the individual responsibility of a man for his own soul. “ Know thyself.” " Be true to thine own self.”

“ Look to thine own footsteps, and if thy straight path help another man to make his path straight, well and good, but thy duty is for thyself and with thyself.” These were his mottoes.

The limitations encompassing Bryant’s powers appear as soon as he departs from the narrow path of reverie in the meadows. Take The Ages as an example.

This poem, he tells us, is meant, by means of history, to encourage the hopeful in their hopes that the world is better and happier than it was, and that it will be better and happier than it is. It touches various matters of history; among others, the Roman Catholic Church. Here is one aspect of her condition prior to the Reformation: —

The effect of the Reformation is thus described : —

When the poet reaches the year of his poem, 1821, he alludes to the United States and to Europe in these lines : —

This is commonplace. It is poor in form, and narrow-minded in substance. We merely quote it as a sample of his work in matters not native to his cunning.

The mechanical work of Bryant’s poetry is generally well done : the rhymes rhyme, the rhythm moves along, the blank verse does not halt. His language is good, yet it is not flexible enough for lyrical poetry. Perhaps it is not fanciful to trace the influence of Pope, which fell upon him in boyhood, in much of his work all through life. A correct, monotonous metre shows in many passages, where his inspiration is scant of breath. Bryant, however, rarely tries to do what he cannot do fairly well. His fine self-sobriety taught him what to eschew. Sometimes his form is his misfortune, in that it recalls Campbell or Moore ; for a marked metre, of course, calls to memory the best poems in that metre, and the comparison suggested is not always fair. His blank verse is very good ; not majestic, but simple and severe. It fails to impress us as the handiwork of a man who is confident in perfect mastery. There is none of the flush of victory that shows in Milton’s verse. Shakespeare’s lines move like Othello, simple, innocent, yet with a royal manner, and in the verse lurks the tremulous presence of passion. A man may write good blank verse, and yet deprecate such a comparison. But these are the poets that will come to the reader’s mind. Some of Wordsworth’s blank verse is admirable, appropriate to the emotion, delicate and powerful, ebbing and swelling like far-off noises which rise and fall with the wind. Tennyson’s is most individual. It would be rash to compare Bryant’s verse with theirs. Blank verse is the metre in English most sensitive to the personality of the writer. I here is no juster measure of a man. It cannot be handled theatrically, it will not lend itself to tricks, it will be no man’s mask. In it the poet walks, great or small, heroic, human, or mean, according to the measure that nature has meted to him. Art can enable the poet to write blank verse, but it cannot help him to hide himself in it. The greatest blank verse must be written by the greatest man. Take the form of a sonnet as the other extreme in poetical form, and it appears that greatness is almost out of place. Petrarch’s sonnets, as sonnets, are better than Michelangelo s, they are better than Milton’s, they are better than Shakespeare’s. Craft, skill, long endeavor, patience, ingenuity, are all necessary to the construction of a sonnet. It is not so with blank verse : that is a glass house which none but the worthy must inhabit. Bryant’s blank verse is at its best in Thanatopsis. In his translation of Homer it struggles to produce the effect of the Greek hexameters, and it rejects this alien duty. In Sella it sometimes reads too much like prose, wherein the words are shifted out of deference to the beat of the verse. Simplicity is the most serviceable slave, but the worst master, and Bryant occasionally felt the weight of its yoke. His sonnets are very poor sonnets, feeble imitations of Wordsworth. Bryant is said to have had correct knowledge of metre, but he had not sufficient flexibility and delicacy, not enough effeminacy of taste, we might say, to use that knowledge well and successfully.

Bryant’s prose consists of his editorials in the New York Evening Post, of various letters gathered into two volumes, entitled Letters of a Traveller, and of sundry discourses and orations. His style is simple, direct, and clear. It is almost too baldly simple. It has the shrewd simplicity of the prose of a Yankee storekeeper. It discloses a mind with almost childlike curiosity, which picks up the things immediately in front of it, and then, those dropped, reaches towards one new object after another. Some men are born to write of travels ; they establish a human relation with bridges, towers, cornpatches, chance passengers in the omnibus, and they can give on paper an interesting account of these intimacies. We are absorbed in their breakfasts, in their troubles with foreign coins, in their purchases of cologne or snuff. We read eagerly what they have to say of the Tower, of Salisbury Cathedral, of the Boulevard des Capucines, — of everything we may have seen fifty times and read about a hundred. Keats’s letters written on his trip in Scotland are of this kind. It is not Scotland that charms us, but the short liaison between it and Keats. Bryant tells us facts, conscientiously and intelligently. He has one great merit: he tells what he sees, he describes it as it appears to his mind. There is no mixture of the opinions of art critics and amateurs; there is the blunt delineation of the prospect as it was reflected on the retinas of Bryant’s eyes. He goes to Venice, “ this most pleasing of the Italian cities which I had seen,” and there is no declamation. In Paris he passes the fountain of Molèere in the Rue Richelieu, “ where the effigy of the comic author ” stands, and there is no disquisition upon his genius, with a peroration pronouncing his inferiority to Shakespeare. He went to an exhibition at Turin. “ The first thing I observed, on entering the lower galleries of the Valentino, was a long case of shelves filled with models of the different varieties of cultivated fruits, executed with such skill as fairly to deceive the eye. I took them for real fruit till I was told better.”He then describes them for half a page. These imitation peaches and plams interested him, and this interest is most agreeable compared with an assumption of æsthetic superiority to a waxen apple. Bryant’s chief attractiveness is in his modesty. It always is by him. He omits all gossip of famous men from his letters, he leaves out all special courtesies shown to him. This modesty is not tinged with affectation, but it is a union of native self-respect and early training. It makes us proud of our country to see how simply and worthily her true-born sons demean themselves. Bryant had the simple standard that a man is to be judged by his deserts, and by no false measures, which we, pleasing our fancy in the midst of history, ascribe to some old Romans, and know to be true of some of our own famous countrymen.

Bryant acquired a familiarity with the German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese languages; he had a knowledge of Greek and Latin, and some acquaintance with Provencal ; but he does not show any real affection for literature as literature. He makes no mention of Goethe, none of Dante. He has no allusion to Victor Hugo. He scarce seems aware of Shelley, who was but two years his senior, or of Tennyson. In nothing he says is there enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He admired Dickens ; he enjoyed Sir Walter Scott, but he was driven so to do by his intelligence rather than by any emotional need. He wrote his poetry for the pleasure of self-expression, and not to exalt himself by joining the band of poets. Literature was of his “ life a thing apart; ” whatever he may have said about his love of poetry, the fact remains that, even after he had acquired sufficient property for his needs, he did not devote himself to literature.

Born men of letters do not so. To him letters were an accomplishment.

Bryant’s indifference to literature, or perhaps it were better named the indolence of his attachment to letters, is due partly to himself, and partly to his public. Our self-possessed young republic looked at letters with the eyes of the father in the old comedies: they were very well in their way, but not the sort of thing for serious men. Such views and their kith and kin were eminently useful in the formation of a young country. They enabled us to resist the attraction of an attempt to dazzle the world by a new conception of human relations, of new rights and duties, by a disrespect for property or passion for art. They gave us the cohesiveness of conservatism, the simplicity of measuring everything by its value in gold, and the safety of highroad traveling, which have enabled us to bear our national growth and expansion without breaking. But these notions did not prepare the way for a ready acceptance of new things, nor for nice perception of the value of ideas, nor for an appreciation of literature. Very likely they served us better than more intelligent and broader conceptions of life, and we must accept the advantages with their attendant drawbacks. But they wrought harm to Bryant’s career as a poet and man of letters. Bryant had no fanatic leaven in him. He could never have walked to Rome barefoot, nor have sold all his goods to feed the poor. He accepted implicitly the teachings of common sense, and he found his refreshment in poetry and letters. He looked upon them as refined pleasures rather than as a means of grace or of satisfying spiritual needs. And being such a man, he stood well in need of an eager, emotional public to kindle him into enthusiasm and to quicken his poetic talents.

After Mrs. Bryant died, in 1866, Bryant betook himself for consolation to the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he completely translated before December, 1871, at the age of seventy-seven. There are few things more touching than this comfort tenderly given by man to man across the gap of twenty-five hundred years. Nothing furnishes a more eloquent argument of the worth of poetry and of its profound humanity than this. The translation of Homer is a very personal matter, and seems to stir some of those fires in the human breast that burn only in front of its own Penates. Pope’s translation was a success, Cowper’s was a success ; so were Lord Derby’s and Mr. Bryant’s. Mr. Lang and his associates, also Professor Palmer, have made excellent translations. All these renderings are very different one from another, and doubtless owe their respective successes to the variety among readers. There is one class of people that has never read the Greek, another that has read and forgotten, a third and small class that compares the translation and the original ; and there are other persons still who condemn all translations of Homer without reading them. Bryant’s work is said to be faithful to the original; but the stories of Ilium and of Odysseus feel somewhat ill at ease in English blank verse. The Greek spirit is so different from our spirit, the Greek language is so unlike our language, that almost all translators, and Bryant among them, must rest content with moderate praise. Poetry cannot be transferred from one language to another. Some of Bryant’s translations of Spanish hymns are good. He had the same simplicity that they had who wrote the hymns, and he was able to make fair equivalents in English.

Bryant died in 1878. On May 29 he delivered an address in Central Park at the unveiling of a statue of Mazzini, and the effort exhausted him. He walked across the park to the house of a friend, and on the stoop suddenly fell. He lived until June 12, on which day he died, in his eighty-fifth year, — leaving “ all those things which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends.” His body was buried at Roslyn.

Some men have found in Bryant the poet more than others can find. For Mr. Stoddard “ Bryant confabulates with mountains and clouds ; ” for Mr. Parke Godwin he has “ that peculiar genius which places him among the great meditative poets of all time.” Mr. John Bigelow says, “ Every one of his verses will bear the supreme test of a work of literary art, which discloses a wider horizon and more merit at each successive perusal.”

We are not all alike. Thoughts and words come to us with different force and charm. Nothing brings to our minds more keenly how separate we are than the different welcome and harbor we give to poets.

Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr.