[wzdftpd-devel] speeches of Henry Clay, of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whos

[Harrop V. <sle...@ne...>]

Which has more fancy than is common in Bryant, and which Poe pronounced
his best poem, has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years
she grew in sun and shade," and both of these nameless pieces might
fitly be {516} entitled--as Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden
Treasury_--"The Education of Nature." Although Bryant's career is
identified with New York, his poetry is all of New England. His heart
was always turning back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berkshire
hills. There was nothing of that urban strain in him which appears in
Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, the poet of autumn, of the
American October and the New England Indian Summer, that season of
"dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose subtle analogy with the
decay of the young by the New England disease, consumption, he gave such
tender expression in the _Death of the Flowers_; and amid whose "bright,
late quiet," he wished himself to pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the
melancholy days," as Lowell is of June. If, by chance, he touches upon
June, it is not with the exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of
bobolinks, and in the summer day that is "--simply perfect from its own
resource As to the bee the new campanula's Illuminate seclusion swung in
air." Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by
contrast the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a
passage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which
he speaks of himself, by anticipation, as of one "Whose part in all the
pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is--that his grave is
green." {517} Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild
flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he
dedicated an entire poem--the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in
the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name
will be associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser
celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora. Except when writing of nature
he was apt to be commonplace, and there are not many such energetic
lines in his purely reflective verse as these famous ones from the
_Battle Field_: "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; The eternal
years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, And dies
among his worshipers." He added but slowly to the number of his poems,
publishing a new collection