DORIC SIMPLICITY. 77 and simple style. consider Swinburne, who, above his supernatural gifts of rhythm and language, owes much to youthful explorations in classic and Continental tongues. No doubt Bryant's models confirmed his natural restrictions of speech. But even this narrow verbal range has made his poetry strong and pure; and now, when expression has been carried to its extreme, it is an occasional relief to recur to the clearness, to the exact appreciation of words, discoverable in every portion of his verse and prose. It is like a return from a florid renaissance A pure to the antique; and indeed there was something Doric in Bryant's nature. His diction, like his thought, often refreshes us as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. He refused to depart from what seemed to him the natural order of English verse, — that order which comes to the lips of childhood, and is not foreign to any life or age. The thought was like the measure, that which was old with the fathers and is young in our own time, the pure philosophy of nature's lessons. Give his poems a study, and their simplicity is their charm. How easy it seems to write those natural lines ! Yet it is harder than to catch a hundred fantastic touches of word-painting and dexterous sound. He never was obscure, because he dared not and would not go beyond his proper sight and knowledge, and this was the safeguard of his poetry, his prose, and his almost blameless life. Verse, to Bryant, was the outflow of his deepest emotions; a severe taste and discreet temperament made him avoid the study of decoration. Thus he was always direct and intelligible, and appealed to the common people as strongly as to the select few. I have compared him to our stately men of an older time. Among others Daniel Webster might be mentioned as one whose mood and rhetoric are in keeping with the ant. Webster and Bry Bryant's favorite measures. The iam bic quatrain. poetry of Bryant. Like Webster, our poet always selected the leading, impressive thought, and brushed the rest aside. This he put in with a firm and glowing touch. Many have thought the works of both the statesman and the poet conventional, but the adjective might be brought to apply to all simple and essential truth and diction. Adopting Arnold's distinction, we that Bryant's simplicity was not simplesse, but simplicité. Everett made a good presentation of its strongest claim when he said that poetry, at its best, is "easily intelligible, touching the finest chords of taste and feeling, but never striving at effect. This is the highest merit in every department of literature, and in poetry it is well called inspiration. Surprise, conceit, strange combinations of imagery and expression, may be successfully managed, but it is merit of an inferior kind. The beautiful, pathetic, and sublime. are always simple and natural, and marked by a certain serene unconsciousness of effort." "This," he added, "is the character of Mr. Bryant's poetry." V. LET us again, then, observe its forms and themes, and discover clues to the quality of the genius which idealized them. Bryant's chosen measures were few and simple. Two were special favorites, most frequently used for his pictures of nature and his meditations on the soul of things, and in their use he was a master. One was the iambic quatrain, in octosyllabic verse, of which the familiar stanza, 66 Truth crushed to earth will rise again," may be recalled as a specimen. Many of his best modern pieces are composed in this measure, so evenly and firmly that the slightest change HIS BLANK-VERSE. would mar their sound and flow. "A Day Dream," written in the poet's old age, is perfect of its kind, and may rank almost with Collins's nonpareil, "To fair Fidele's Grassy Tomb." Witness such stanzas as these: 1+1 sat and watched the eternal flow Of those smooth billows toward the shore, Ran with them on the ocean floor." "Then moved their coral lips; a strain Were shaped to syllable and word." verse. 79 His variations upon the iambic quatrain, as in the celebrated poems, "To a Waterfowl" and "The Past," are equally successful. The second of the forms re- His blankferred to is that blank-verse in which his supremacy always was recognized. Among the distinct phases of our grandest English measure that have been observed in literature, Bryant's may be classed with the Reflective, of which Wordsworth, succeeding the didacticians, held unquestioned control, but from the outset it was marked by a quality plainly his own. The essence of its cadence, pauses, rhythm, should be termed American, and it is the best ever written in the New World. Blank-verse is the easiest and the most difficult of all measures; the poorest in poor hands; the finest when written by a true poet. Whoever essays it is a poet disrobed; he must rely upon his natural gifts; his defects cannot be hidden. In this measure Bryant was at his height, and he owes to it the most enduring portion of his fame. However narrow his range, we must own that he was first in the first. He reached the upper air at once in "Thanatopsis," and again and again, though none too frequently, he А рапоramic series. Lofty contemplative poems. renewed his flights, and, like his own waterfowl, pursued his "solitary way." The finest and most sustained of his poems of nature are those written in blank-verse. At intervals so rare throughout his life as to resemble the seven-year harvests, or the occasional wave that overtops the rest, he composed a series of those pieces which now form a unique panorama of nature's aspects, moving to the music of lofty thoughts and melodious words. Such are "A Winter Piece," the "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," "A Forest Hymn," "Summer Wind," "The Prairies," "The Fountain," "A Hymn of the Sea," "A Rain-Dream"; also a few written late in life, showing that the eye of the author of "Thanatopsis" had not been dimmed, nor was his natural force abated: these are "The Constellations," "The River, by Night," and "Among the Trees." In all the treatment is large and ennobling, and distinctly marks each as Bryant's. The method, that of invocation, somewhat resembles the manner of Coleridge's Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni. When in a less enraptured strain, they exhibit repose, feeling, wise and reverent thought. In the same eloquent verse, and with like cæsural pauses and inflections, we find his more purely meditative poems, upon an equal or still higher plane of feeling, "Thanatopsis," the "Hymn to Death," "Earth," "An Evening Revery," "The Antiquity of Freedom," and one of his latest and longest, "The Flood of Years." Yet, in both his reflective verse and that devoted to nature, he often employed lyrical measures with equal excellence; as in the breezy, exquisite poem on "Life," "The Battle Field," "The Future Life," and "The Conqueror's Grave," - the latter one of his most elevating pieces. Especially AN ELEMENTAL IMAGINATION. in his lyrics he seemed like a wind-harp yielding ten- uine expression of a personal mood, and has by this Like the ele ments. 81 At last, then, we are brought to a recognition of the A bard of power in Bryant's verse which has given him a station above that which he could hope to win by its amount or range. It is the elemental quality of his song. the bards of old, his spirit delights in fire, air, earth, and water,- the apparent structures of the starry heavens, the mountain recesses, and the vasty deep. These he apostrophizes, but over them and within them he discerns and bows the knee to the omniscience of a protecting Father, a creative God. Poets, eminent Imagina in this wise, have been gifted always with imagination. The verse of Bryant often is full of high imaginings. Select any portion of "Thanatopsis " :— "Pierce the Barcan wilderness, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there!" Fills the savannas with his murmurings, And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, Within the hollow oak. I listen long To his domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn tion. |