Slender and small, his rounded cheek all brown
And ruddy with the sunshine; let him come
On summer mornings, when the blossoms wake,
And part with little hands the spiky grass,
And touching, with his cherry lips, the edge
Of these bright beakers, drain the gathered dew.
Bryant wrote poems of freedom. The earlier of these, ‘The Song of the Greek Amazon,’ the ‘Massacre at Scio,’ the ‘Greek Partisan,’ and ‘Italy,’ voice his sympathy with the oppressed nations of the Old World, the ‘struggling multitude of states,’ that ‘writhe in shackles.’
Among his later poems on the same theme, ‘Earth,’ ‘The Winds,’ ‘The Antiquity of Freedom,’ and ‘The Battle Field’ are representative. The first three with their many stately lines show how spontaneously his thought, even when nature is not the subject, grows out of the contemplation of nature and then returns to such contemplation as to a resting place. ‘The Battle Field,’ the expression of a noble faith in the outcome of ‘a friendless warfare,’ contains the most inspiring of his quatrains, as it is one of the best contributions made by an American poet to the stock of quotable English verse:—
Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;