of morning to chase away their fears and dreams; that He has not forsaken the race; but that He has given it that impulse by which it ascends higher and higher, seeking for itself, and for its proper haven. God will not leave His church, nor the men who fear Him and love Him. Mother, your children are not going to be cast out and left without a guide. Father, the foundations of morality are not going to be destroyed. Truth remains; and though its forms may change, it will grow larger and better.

Hope thou in God; do not be afraid of changes when they come; fear not to think with thinkers, and to investigate with investigators, if you do it thoroughly and right; do not shrink from meeting that change which, as I shall attempt to show to-night, means new life; for that which means life in nature does not mean death in religion.

VOL. 3.

NEW YORK, JULY, 1878.

No. 4.

Oration at the Funeral of William Cullen

Bryant.

DELIVERED IN ALL-SOULS' CHURCH, NEW YORK, June 14, 1878, BY Henry W Bellows, D.D.

THE whole country is bending with us, their favored representatives, over the bier that holds the dust of Bryant! Private as the simple service is that consigns the ashes of our illustrious poet and journalist to the grave, there is public mourning in all hearts and homes, making these funeral rites solemn and universal by the sympathy that from every quarter flows toward them, and swells the current of grateful and reverent emotion. Much as the modest, unworldly spirit of the man we mourn shrunk from the parade of public rites, leaving to his heirs the duty of a rigid simplicity in his funeral, neither his wishes nor theirs could render his death and burial less than an event of general significance and national concern. It is not for his glory that we honor and commemorate him. Public fame, for more than half a century, has made it needless, or impossible, to add one laurel to his crown. So long ago he took the place he has since kept in public admiration, respect and reverence, that no living tongue could now dislodge or add to the security and mild splendor of his reputation. For three generations he has been a fixed star in our firmament, and no eulogy could be so complete as that which by accumulation of meaning dwells in the simple mention of his

name.

Few lives have been as fortunate and complete as his. Born in 1794, when this young nation was in its teens, he has been contemporary with nearly the whole first century of its life. If no country ever experienced in the same period such a miracle of growth, if none ever profited so much by discoveries and inventions-never before so wonderful as those made in the half century which gave us steam-navigation, the railroad and the telegraph-he saw the birth, he antedates the existence of every one of the characteristic triumphs of modern civilization, and yet he has not died until they became wholly familiar and nearly universal in their fruitful influence! Born and bred in New England, and on the summits of the Green Mountains, he inherited the severe and simple tastes and habits

of that rugged region, and having sprung from a vigorous and intellectual parentage,* and in contact with a few persons with whom nature and books took the place of social pleasures and the excitements of town and cities, his native genius made him, from a tender age, the thoughtful and intimate companion of woods and streams, and constituted him Nature's own darling child. It was a friendship so unfeigned, so deep, so much in accordance with his temperament and mental constitution that it grew into a determining passion and shaped his whole life, while in the poetry to which it gave birth it laid the foundations and erected the structure of his poetic fame. What Wordsworth did for English poetry, in bringing back the taste for Nature, as the counterpart of humanity-a world to be interpreted not by the outward eyes, but by the soul-Bryant did for America. One who knew them both, as I did, could not fail to observe the strong resemblance in character and feeling, with the marked difference between them on which I will not dwell. Both were reserved, unsmiling, austere or irresponsive men, in aspect; not at home in cities or in crowds, not easy of access, or dependent on companionship-never fully themselves except when alone with nature. They coveted solitude, for it gave them uninterrupted intercourse with that beautiful, companionable, tender, unintrusive world, which is to ordinary souls dull, common, familiar, but to them was ever new, ever mysterious, ever delightful and instructive.

Few know how small a part intercourse with nature for itself alone-not for what it teaches, but for what it is, a revelation of Divine beauty and wisdom and goodness-had even a half century ago for the common mind. Wordsworth in England, Bryant in America, awoke this sleeping capacity, and by their tender and awed sense of the spiritual meaning conveyed in Nature's consummate beauties and harmonies, gave almost a new sense to our generation. Before their day we had praises of the seasons and passages of poetry in which cataracts, sunsets, rainbows and garden flowers were faithfully describedbut nature as a whole-as a presence, the very garment of God, was almost unheeded and unknown. When we consider what Bryant's poems- read in the public schools in happy selection -have done to form the taste and feed the sentiment of two generations, we shall begin to estimate the value of his influence. And when we recall in all his writings not a thought or feeling that is not pure, uplifting and reverent, we can partly measure the gratitude we owe to a benefactor whose genius

* It is his own father he refers to in his " Hymn to Death":

"For he is in his grave who taught my youth

The art of verse, and in the bud of life

Offered me to the Muses."

has consecrated the woods, and fields, and brooks and wayside flowers, in a way intelligible to plainer minds, and yet above the criticism of the most fastidious and cultivated.

But if fortunate in passing his early life in the country and forming his taste and his style in communion with nature, and with a few good books and a few earnest and sincere people, he was equally fortunate in being driven by a love of independence into the study of the law and a ten years' practice in a considerable town in Western Massachusetts, and then drawn to this city where he drifted into the only form of public life wholly suited to his capacities-the editorial profession.

It was no accident that made Bryant a politician and an editor. Sympathy with individual men and women was not his strong point-but sympathy with our common humanity was in him a religious passion He had a constitutional love of freedom and an intense sentiment of justice, and they constituted together his political creed and policy. He believed in freedom--and this made him a friend of the oppressed, an enemy of slavery, a foe to special and class legislation, an advocate of free trade-a natural Democrat, though born and reared in a Federal community that looked with suspicion upon extensions of the suffrage and upon the growth of local and State rights. But his love of freedom was too genuine to allow him to condone the faults even of his own party, when freedom's friends were found on the other side. He could bear, he did bear the odium of his unpopular conviction, when what was called the best society in New York was of another opinion and belonged to another party-and he could bear with equal fortitude the ignominy of lacking party fidelity, when his patriotic spirit felt that his old political friends were less faithful than they should be to freedom and union. The editorial profession enabled his shy and somewhat unsocial nature to work at arm's length for the good of humanity and the country; and I can conceive of no other calling in life that would have economized his temperament and faculties so fully in the public service. His literary skill, his industry, his humane philosophy, his sentiments of justice, his patriotism, his love of freedom here found full scope without straining and tasking his personal sympathies, which lacked the readiness, the tact and the genialty that in some men make direct contact with their fellow-creatures an increase of power and of influence. What an editor he made you all know. None could long doubt the honesty, the conscientiousness, the elevation and purity of his convictions or his utterances. Who believes he ever swerved a line, for the sake of popularity or pelf, from what he felt to be right and true? That he escaped all prostitution of his pen or his conscience, in his exposed and tempted calling, we all admiringly confess. And what moder

ation, candor and courage he carried into his editorial work. Purity of thought, elegance and simplicity of style, exquisite taste and high morality characterized all he wrote. He rebuked the headlong spirit of party, sensational extravagances of expression, even the use. of ne ngled phrases and un-English words. He could see and a Kowledge the merits of those from whom he widely differe hile unbecoming personalities found no harbor in his colu r 3. Young men and women never found anything to corru heir taste or their morals in his paper, and families could say lay the Evening Post upon the table where their children and their guests might take it up. Uncompromising in what his convictions commanded, and never evading the frankest expression of his real opinion, however unpopular, he was felt to be above mere partisanship, and so had a decided influence with men of all political preferences. His prose was in its way as good as his poetry, and has aided greatly to correct the taste for swollen, gaudy and pretentious writing in the public press. He was not alone in this respect, for none can fail to recall the services in this direction of Charles King and Horace Greeley, not to name less conspicuous instances. But Bryant's poetic fame gave peculiar authority to his editorial example, and made his style specially helpful and instructive. That he should have succeeded in keeping the poetic temperament and the tastes and pursuits of a poet fully alive under the active and incessant pressure of his journalistic laborsmaking his bread and his immediate influence as a citizen and a leader of public sentiment by editorial work, while he "built the lofty rhyme" for the gratification of his genius and for the sake of beauty and art, without one glance at immediate suffrages or rewards, if not a solitary, is at least a perfect example of the union in one man of the power to work with nearly equal success, in two planes, where what he did in one did not contradict or conflict with what he did in the other, while they were not mingled or confounded. Nobody detects the editor, the politician, the man of business, in Bryant's poetry, and few feel the poet in his editorial writings-but the man of conscience, of humanity, of justice and truth, of purity and honor, appears equally in both. This is somewhat the more remarkable, because affluence, versatility and humor are not characteristic of his genius. It is staid, earnest, profoundly truthful and pure, lofty and perfectly genuine-but not mercurial, vivacious, protean and brilliant. Like the Jordan that leaps into being full, strong, crystal-pure, but swells little in its deep bed, all its course to its sea-admitting few tributaries and putting out no branches, Bryant's genius sprang complete into public notice when he was still in his teens; it retained its character for sixty years almost unchanged, and its latest products are marked