These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth’s charms: upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie.
The ‘Song of the Stars,’ though not one of Bryant’s happiest poems,—the hypercritical reader feeling that the ‘orbs of beauty’ and ‘spheres of flame’ might have made a more appropriate metrical choice for their song,—shows none the less the poet’s strength in dealing with nature in the large. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ are magical in part by virtue of the impression they make of immense distance. With the poet’s penetrating vision we can see the solitary way through the rosy depths, the pathless coast, and the one bit of life in
The desert and illimitable air.
Bryant’s mind readily lifts itself from the minute to the massive, as in the poem ‘Summer Wind,’ a fine example of the crescendo effects he knew so well how to produce. In a few lines he gives the sensation of heat, closeness, exhaustion, and pictures the plants drooping in a stillness broken only by the ‘faint and interrupted murmur of the bee.’ His thought then sweeps upward to the wooded hills towering in scorching heat and dazzling light, and then still higher to the bright clouds,