en published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted
immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two
years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a
wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was
not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the
universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank
verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is
extremely noble. In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English
blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it
falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was
characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into
possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and
about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity,
and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in
his own _Hymn to the North Star_:

"And thou dost see them rise,
Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone, in thy cold skies,
Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet,
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main."

In 1821 he read _The Ages_, a didactic poem, in thirty-five stanzas,
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year
brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in
1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington
Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience
in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by
heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's
school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though
not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor,
with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or
openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere
imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best
poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its
calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His
office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be
the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of
nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Water-fowl_,
_June_, the _Death of the Flow