Youth, Manhood, Age, that draws us to the ground,
And last, Man's Life on earth,
Glide to thy dim dominions, and are bound.

* * * * *

"In thy abysses hide
Beauty and excellence unknown,--to thee
Earth's wonder and her pride
Are gathered, as the waters to the sea;

"Labors of good to man,
Unpublished charity, unbroken faith,--
Love, that 'midst grief began,
And grew with years, and faltered not in death.

"Full many a mighty name
Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevered;
With thee are silent fame.
Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappeared.

"Thine for a space are they,--
Yet shalt thou yield thy treasures up at last;
Thy gates shall yet give way,
Thy bolts shall fall, inexorable Past!

"All that of good and fair
Has gone into thy womb from earliest time
Shall then come forth to wear
The glory and the beauty of its prime."

Here is nothing new. It is the old, sad strain, of coeval birth with
poetry itself. It may be read in the Hebrew of the Book of Job and in
the Greek of Homer: but with what dignity of sentiment, what majestic
music, what beauty of language, the oft-repeated lesson of humanity is
enforced! Every word is chosen with unerring judgment, and no needless
dilution of language weakens the force of the conceptions and pictures.
Bryant is one of the few poets who will bear the test of the well-nigh
obsolete art of verbal criticism: observe the expressions, "_silent_
fame," "_forgotten_ arts," "wisdom _disappeared_": how exactly these
epithets satisfy the ear and the mind! how impossible to change any one
of them for the better!

In Bryant's descriptive poems there is the same finished execution and
the same beauty of style as in his reflective and didactic poems, with
more originality of treatment. It was his fortune to be born and reared
in the western part of Massachusetts, and to become familiar with some
of the most beautiful inland scenery of New England in youth and early
manhood, when the mind takes impressions which the attrition of life
never wears out. In his study of Nature he combines the faculty and the
vision, the eye of the naturalist and the imagination of the poet. No
man observes the outward shows of earth and sky more accurately; no man
feels them more vividly; no man describes them more beautifully. He was
the first of our poets who, deserti