Like currents journeying through the windless deep.
This is flat contradiction of the idea that entirely self-conscious and self-controlled art can avail to move the reader. Bryant pleads for deepest feeling in exercise of the poetic function; it is more than important, it is indispensable. Of that striking poem ‘The Tides,’ he said ‘it was written with a certain awe upon me which made me hope that there might be something in it.’ The poem proved to be one of Bryant’s noblest conceptions. Yet a lady of ‘judgment’ told one of Bryant’s friends, who of course told him, that she did not think there was much in it.
Nature appeals to Bryant in her broad and massive aspects. ‘The Prairies’ is an illustration. Gazing on the ‘encircling vastness’ for the first time, the heart swells and the eye dilates in an effort to comprehend it:—
Lo! they stretch,
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless forever.
As the poet looks abroad over the vast and glowing fields, there sweeps by him a vision of the races that have peopled these solitudes and perished to make room for races to come. It is magnificent even if it is not scientific. In the sense it gives of the spaciousness of the prairies with the myriad sounds of life projected on the great elemental silence, it is a true American poem.
‘A Hymn of the Sea’ is another illustration of that largeness of view characteristic of Bryant. Each thought is lofty and far-reaching. The cloud that rises from the ‘realm of rain’ shadows whole countries, the tornado wrecks a fleet, whirling the vast hulks ‘like chaff upon the waves:’—