That steals away their sharpness, ere he is aware.
This was nothing new in poetry. Shakespeare had written his plays almost entirely in this way, and Milton all of “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained,” and the later English poets, most notably Wordsworth, had just returned to it; but in America it was as unfamiliar as the “free verse” which is puzzling a good many readers to-day partly because it is printed in units of meaning instead of units of measure. No wonder that Dana was surprised, “on this side the Atlantic.”
When Bryant went down into the crowded activity of New York City the general tone of his work began to change. The things that he was doing interested him as the practice of law never had done. The editorship of the Evening Post made him not merely a news vender but a molder of public thought, and his entrance into the world of opinion gave him more of an interest in life itself and less in his own emotions. Very soon he wrote the “Hymn of the City” to record his discovery that God lived in the town as well as in the country and that he was the God of life quite as much as the God of death.
Thy Spirit is around, Quickening the restless mass that sweeps along; And this eternal sound— Voices and footfalls of the numberless throng— Like the resounding sea, Or like the rainy tempest, speaks of Thee.
Then in “The Battle Field” (1837) and “The Antiquity of Freedom” (1842) he moved on to what was a new thought in his verse. He was still interested in beauty, whether it were the beauty of nature or the beauty of holiness; but as a man who had plunged into the thick of things he became for the first time wide-awake to the idea that as the world grows older it grows wiser and that the well-rounded life cannot be content simply to contemplate the beauties of June, for it must also have some part in the struggle for justice. He had grown into nothing less than a new idea of God. As a young Puritan he had felt Him to be a power outside, who managed things. He had been content to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and then he had turned his back on earth and meditated about heaven. But now he aspired to do with heaven what Addison had attempted to do with “philosophy,” and bring it down from the clouds into the hearts of men. When he wrote, in "The Battle Field,” “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,” he meant, as the rest of the poem shows, not the old truth of centuries but the unfamiliar truth which the new age must set on its throne.
There is perhaps no more striking illustration of the adoption of so-called new truth than in the world’s attitude toward the holding of property in human life. Up to the time of Bryant’s birth slaveholding had been practiced in all the United States, by the Puritans of New England as well as by the Cavaliers of the South. During the colonial days in both regions the Bible had been accepted as final authority. What it counseled and what it did not prohibit was right, and what it condemned was wrong; and, judged on these grounds, slavery was apparently sanctioned in the Bible. In spite of this, many leaders, both North and South, protested against the practice before 1800. As time went on, largely on account of the climate and the nature of the industries, slavery waned in the North and thrived in the South. Then in New England the great agitation arose; but still, in Massachusetts as well as in Virginia, the men whose bank accounts were involved defended human bondage on Scriptural grounds, protesting violently against
creeds that dare to teach
What Christ and Paul refrained to preach.
Yet in the end the principle for which the Revolution was fought was reaffirmed in behalf of the slaves who were serving the sons of the Revolution.
Bryant became painfully conscious of the many issues to be fought out in the cause of liberty, and in “The Antiquity of Freedom” he wrote of the eternal vigilance and the eternal conflict needed to maintain it.