There is a slight touch of self-commendation in his continual references to his thrills and awes and adorations and in the “pleasurable melancholy,” as Poe called it, with which he enjoyed life, but we shall see that life in the city changed this for something more positive.
Before turning away from this period, however, the student should take heed of its poetic form. The remarkable thing about “Thanatopsis” was not that Bryant should have entertained the thoughts it contains or that he should have aspired to write them, but that he expressed them in verses that were so beautiful and so different from anything ever written before in America. It was their form at which Dana exclaimed in his much-quoted remark to Phillips in the North American Review office. When Bryant was a boy our native writers were, all but Freneau, in the habit of imitating the English poets and essayists who had set the style a full hundred years before. The young American who felt a drawing to literature saturated himself in the writings of Addison, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, and their followers (see pp. 70, 93, 116, etc.). The verses of these men were neat, clean-cut, and orderly, and filed down their pages like regiments of soldiers on dress parade. They went along in rimed pairs, with a place to draw breath near the middle of each line, a slight pause at the end of the first, and a full stop at the end of the second. As a fashion, to be sure, it was no more natural than the high, powdered headdresses and hoop skirts which prevailed with the ladies at the same time, but it was a courtly literary convention, and it could be acquired by any writer who was patient and painstaking. In 1785 the best that John Trumbull could hope for America was that it might produce copyists of these Englishmen, and he expressed his hope in the usual set style—like a boy scout in uniform dreaming of the day when he and his fellows may develop into Leonard Woodses and Pershings (see p. 70). And Joseph Rodman Drake, writing in one of the years when “Thanatopsis” was lying unpublished in Dr. Bryant’s desk, put his desire into an even more complex measure, a modification of the Spenserian stanza (see p. 136).
Bryant, it will be remembered, made his first poetic flights in the style of Pope, and he did well enough to be apparently on the highroad of old-fashioned imitation. Then suddenly, while still a boy, he lifted himself out of the rut of rime and began writing a free, fluent “blank verse.” It is the same five-stressed measure which Pope used,—the measure of Shakespeare too, “If music be the food of love, play on”—but it is without rime, and the pauses come where the sense demands instead of where the versification dictates. In the passages just cited from Trumbull and Drake there is only one line where the sense runs on without a slight pause,—the sense is forced to conform to the rhythm; but in “Thanatopsis,” although the rhythm is quite regular, the pauses occur at all sorts of places, and seldom at the line-ends. As Bryant set down the first seven and four-fifth lines, for example, they read:
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild