The record of an idle revery.
This leads to the second characteristic of Bryant’s earlier verse—more often than not it was self-conscious and self-applied. He wrote to “The Yellow Violet” and devoted five stanzas to it, but ended with three more of self-analysis. The stanzas “To a Waterfowl” have a general and beautiful application, but they were pointed in his mind by the thought that he needed aid to “lead my steps aright” in the choice of his life’s vocation. Even the modest autumn flower, the “Fringed Gentian,” reminded him of the autumn of his own life and the hope that he might do as the flower, and look to heaven when the hour of death drew near. This was the voice of youth which takes life as a personal matter and assumes, out of sheer inexperience, that to his concrete wants “the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.” Maturity makes the wise man lift his eyes unto the hills whence cometh his help, instead of continually brooding on his own hopes and fears. But this habit of self-examination was natural not only to the young Puritan, vaguely dissatisfied with the barren existence of a country lawyer; it was closely akin to the sentimentalism of the age (see pp. 125 and 148). Bryant was like many of the late eighteenth-century poets, dramatists, and novelists in his belief that quickness of emotion was admirable in itself and that the tenderer emotions were marks of refinement. After he had settled in the city he looked back with a glance of approval to the days when the springs of feeling were filled to the brim.
I cannot forget with what fervid devotion
I worshipped the visions of verse and of fame;
Each gaze at the glories of earth, sky, and ocean,
To my kindled emotions was wind over flame.
And deep were my musings in life’s early blossom,
Mid the twilight of mountain-groves wandering long;
How thrilled my young veins, and how throbbed my full bosom,
When o’er me descended the spirit of song.