The poet finds inspiration not alone in the terror of the storm, the majesty of the forest, the gray waste of ocean, the mystery of the night of stars, but in the humbler things, the rivulet by which he played as a child, the violet growing on its bank, the hum of bees, the notes of hang-bird and wren, the gossip of swallows, and the gay chirp of the ground squirrel. ‘The Yellow Violet’ and the lines ‘To the Fringed Gentian’ spring from this love of the unobtrusive charms of Nature. Less familiar than these, but a faultless example of Bryant’s art, is ‘The Painted Cup:’—
... tell me not
That these bright chalices were tinted thus
To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet
On moonlight evenings in the hazel bowers,
And dance till they are thirsty.
The poet will not call up ‘faded fancies of an ‘elder world.’ If the fresh savannahs must be peopled with creatures of imagination, it may be done without borrowing European elves:—
Let then the gentle Manitou of flowers,
Lingering among the bloomy waste he loves,
Though all his swarthy worshippers are gone—