ers_, and the _Evening Wind_. The song,
"O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than is common in
Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious
resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade,"
and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be entitled--as
Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of
Nature."

Although Bryant's career is identified with New York his poetry is all
of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods
and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban
strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial,
the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian
Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose
subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease,
consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the
Flowers_, and amid whose "bright, late quiet" he wished himself to pass
away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of
June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant
gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day
that is

"simply perfect from its own resource,
As to the bee the new campanula's
Illuminate seclusion swung in air."

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast
the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of
deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks
of himself, by anticipation, as of one

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is--that his grave is green."

Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the
yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an
entire poem--the orchis and the golden-rod, "the aster in the wood and
the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be
associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine,
and Emerson's with the rhodora.

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there
are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as
these famous ones from _The Battle-Field_:

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshipers."

He added but s