We shall not enter into any criticism of Mr. Bryant's poetry here, because it has been so fully estimated before, that there is no need of doing so again; but there is one view which has been taken of it, on which we shall offer a few remarks. That view occurs in the following passage of Mr. J. R. Lowell's Fable for Critics:
"There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,
As a smooth, silent iceberg that never is ignified,
Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights
With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation,
(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation,)
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,—
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em,
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole,
"He is very nice reading in summer, but inter
Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter;
Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,
When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.
But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in him,
He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;
And his heart in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is,
Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities—
To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?
No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their limestone and granite.
If you're one who in loco (add foco here) desipis,
You will get out of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;
But you'd get deeper down if you came as a precipice,
And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,
If you could only palm yourself off for a mountain.
Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,
Some scholar who's hourly expecting his learning,
Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth
Is worth near as much as your whole tuneful herd's worth.
No, don't be absurd, he's an excellent Bryant;
But, my friends, you'll endanger the life of your client,
By attempting to stretch him up into a giant:
If you choose to compare him, I think there are two persons
fit for a parallel—Thomson and Cowper;
I don't mean exactly,—there's something of each,
There's T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach;
Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness
Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness,
And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,
Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—
A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on
The heart which strives vainly to burst off a button,—
A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,
Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic;
He's a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,
And the advantage that Wordsworth before him has written.
Now, what is the main charge here: that Mr. Bryant, while he has great sympathy with external nature, with mountains and precipices, has no sympathy with his fellow-man. 'Tis a weighty charge—the weightiest that can be made against a man or a poet. It says virtually that he has no soul, no heart, no impulse, no feeling, except for brutes and vegetables; in short, that he is no better than a heathen savage, a regular worshipper of stocks and stones, without natural affection, or without God in the world. "For," as the apostle queries very wisely, "if he love not man, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?" Your lines, then, Mr. Quiz, imply nothing less than black, bleak, barren, unredeemed practical Atheism!
But can there be the remotest semblance of truth in them? Is our Bryant such a heathen or atheist as not to know his fellow-men except they present themselves in the disguise of mountains, or he see them, like the prophet, as trees walking? We appeal to you, young ladies, who have been melted into tears by his pathos. We appeal to you, young men, whose every purpose of good has been quickened into livelier action by his words; and to you, old heads, whose experience has learned a riper and mellower wisdom from his fine meditative views of the ends and aims of life.
Yet, before you render your concurrent answers, with somewhat of indignation that anybody could put you upon the task, let us, in good American sort, begin with a few statistics. This is a question of fact, and since it has been raised, we will determine it by facts.
There are, in Carey & Hart's splendid edition of Bryant—we mean splendid as to the typography and paper, and not inclusive of those ill-drawn sketches of Leutze, who has made the women all German and given Mr. William Tell of Switzerland a straddle as wide as the Dardanelles, to say nothing of the hideous face of Rizpah and that Monk so excessively huge as to stand some forty feet from the pillar against which he leans—this splendid edition, we say, contains just one hundred and thirty-two poems, all told, to which,—stand up and listen, to the sentence, Mr. Lowell!—more than seventy refer wholly to subjects of an exclusively human interest—man in his being and doing, while nine out of ten of the rest, though occupied primarily with some phase of external nature, are yet so managed as to weave a deep and beautiful human philosophy,—with the dull and dead proceedings of the mechanical world. Yes, Mr. Critic, we say that there is a very fine, a very rich, a very noble and very touching vein of human sentiment, which runs through all of Bryant's writings, whereby, even as much as Wordsworth, he makes these mountains and precipices a part of our human life, and whereby, too, he makes the whole of us, who read him lovingly, that is, who read him at all, much better men and women, in our several spheres. No human sympathies forsooth! Why there are hundreds, nay, thousands, of us, who have derived many of their tenderest and noblest humanities from this very cold-blooded He-Daphne; this fleshless marble Apollo,—this Ice-Palace and Alpine glacier,—far shining brilliant, but oh how frigid!
By poems of an exclusive human interest, we mean, such as bear directly on man's experience and duties and relations in this life: such as the Ages, for instance, which commemorates the progress of humanity, through all its trials and triumphs: such as Thanatopsis, which makes the grave glorious, and pours the light of a lofty and serene religion around our darkest hour: such as the Old Man's Funeral, more divine in its descriptive beauty than the best sermon we ever heard: such as the Battle Field, which animates us with the voice of trumpet to meet the stern struggles of daily warfare: and such as many others in the same vein, to say nothing of the Murdered Traveller, the Massacre at Scio, the Hunter of the Prairies, the Living Lost, the Crowded Street, the Greek Boy, the Arctic Lover, the African Chief, the Child's Funeral, &c., &c. These could only have been prompted by a strong feeling of sympathy with man, and though executed with the nicest finish of art, are yet full of touching pathos and sentiment. The best proof of this is, that they invariably excite the emotions they were intended to excite—and that, too, in no milk and waterish way. They sink straight into the heart; they open the fountains of the feelings; they send the salt water to the eyes (if that be needed); they make the blood tingle; in short, they produce that all-overishness which comes upon one when he sees a fine action on the stage, or reads a noble passage in an oration, or looks at Lentze's Washington. Try it on yourself, if you don't believe it, or, what is better, try it on your little girl and boy, whose feelings are not yet case-hardened or frozen over! It will be a queer kind of frigidity that they will be witness to. Why, bless your soul, Mr. Lowell, we are free to confess that we have ourselves long, long ago, cried over the Indian Girl's Lament, and the Death of the Flowers,—yes, cried, and we say it without shame,—indeed, with a strange sense of regret that we cannot cry now over things of that sort. Eheu, eheu fugaces, &c.
More than that, we have asseverated that even in poems which are not immediately emotional, which are directed to some phase of mere external nature, the humanitary tendencies of Bryant break out, or shine through as veins of silver from the rocks. It is, in fact, one of his most charming peculiarities, that he habitually connects great moral and social truths with the various aspects of nature. His muse is never satisfied with celebrating the pomp and glory of the external world; she must find a deeper meaning in all than what the eye sees or the ear hears; she must trace some beautiful analogy, some spiritual significance on which both mind and heart can repose. Bryant's descriptions of nature, it is granted, are accurate to a line; what he speaks he knows; he finds no nightingales nor cowslips just three thousand miles away from where it is possible for them to live; and he never writes from his memory of books; yet his descriptions are more than mere descriptions,—dull scientific catalogues of quantities,—herbariums of dried plants,—museums of withered lifeless twigs, and of stuffed animals standing thereupon! They have all a meaning under them—a hidden wisdom—a genial yet profound human soul. It is thus that he has wound our affections around the North Star, the Winds, Monument Mountain, and even the Ruffled Grouse. How often, too, in the midst of his general meditations and philosophizings, does some touching individual allusion creep in, to show that the poet's heart is all alive with sensibility: as in the Hymn to Death, which closes with that solemn monody on the Departure of his Father:
"Alas! I little thought that the stern Power,
Whose fearful praise I sung, would try me thus,
Before the strain was ended. It must cease.—
For he is in his grave, who taught my youth
The art of verse, and in the bud of life
Offered me to the Muses. Oh, cut off
Untimely! when the reason in its strength
Ripened by years of toil and studious search,
And watch of Nature's silent lessons, taught
The hand to practice best the lenient art,
To which thou gavest thy laborious days,
And last, thy life. And, therefore, when the earth
Received thee, tears were in unyielding eyes,
And on hard cheeks, and they who deemed thy skill
Delayed their death hour, shuddered and turned pale
When thou wert gone. This faltering verse which thou
Shalt not, as wont, o'erlook, is all I have
To offer at thy grave,—this—and the hope
To copy thy example, and to leave
A name of which the wretched shall not think
As of an enemy's, whom they forgive
As all forgive the dead. Rest, therefore, thou
Whose early guidance trained my infant steps—
Rest, on the bosom of God, till the brief sleep
Of Death is over—and a happier life
Shall dawn to waken thine insensible dust!"
Does an iceberg write in that strain, we should like to know? Or does it mourn the death of the flowers, in this wise: