We may say of Bryant what was true of Cooper, that when he enters a forest, power seems to come unbidden to his pen. Bryant's Forest Hymn (1825) finds God in those green temples:—
"Thou art in the soft winds
That run along the summit of these trees
In music."
He points out the divinity that shapes our ends in:—
"That delicate forest flower,
With scented breath and look so like a smile."
No Puritan up to this time had represented God in a guise more pleasing than the smile of a forest flower. This entire Hymn seems like a great prayer rooted deep in those earlier prayers to which the boy used to listen.
Although Bryant lived to be eighty-four, he wrote less poetry than Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, and about one third as much as Shelley, who was scarcely thirty when he was drowned. It is not length of days that makes a poet. Had Bryant died in his thirtieth year, his excellence and limitations would be fairly well shown in his work finished at that time. At this age, in addition to the five poems in his 1821 volume (p. 139), he had written The Winter Piece, A Forest Hymn, and The Death of the Flowers. These and a number of other poems, written before he had finished his thirtieth year, would have entitled him to approximately the same rank that he now holds in the history of American poetry. It is true that if he had then passed away, we should have missed his exquisite call to The Evening Wind (1829), and some of his other fine productions, such as To the Fringed Gentian (1829), The Prairies (1832), The Battle-Field (1837), with its lines which are a keynote to Bryant's thought and action:—
"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,
Th' eternal years of God are hers."
We are thankful for the ideals voiced in The Poet (1863), and we listen respectfully to The Flood of Years (1876), as the final utterance of a poet who has had the experience of fourscore years.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Bryant is the first great American poet. His poetry is chiefly reflective and descriptive, and it is remarkable for its elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. He lacks dramatic power and skill in narration. Calmness and restraint, the lack of emotional intensity, are also evident in his greatest work. His depths of space are vast, but windless. In The Poet he says that verse should embody:—
"… feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the windless deep."