"The rivulet, late unseen,
Where bickering through the shrubs its waters run,
Shines with the image of its golden screen
And glimmerings of the sun.

"But, 'neath yon crimson tree,
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame."

Here is nothing imitative or borrowed, and here are no unmeaning
generalities. Everything is exact and local,--drawn from an American
autumn, and no other. And how lovely an image is that in the third
stanza, and what an added charm it gives to an object in itself most
beautiful!

But our renders must indulge us with one more quotation under this head,
although we take it from one of the most popular--perhaps the most
popular--of his poems, "The Death of the Flowers."

"The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.
And now, when comes the calm mid-day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home,
_When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill_,
The south-wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more."

Of the poetry of these exquisite lines, the melancholy sweetness of the
sentiment, the delicate beauty of the versification, we need not say one
word, but we claim a moment's attention to their fidelity to truth, and
the accuracy of observation which they evince. The golden-rod and the
aster are the characteristic autumn flowers in that zone of our
continent in which New England is embraced, and the sunflower is a very
common flower at that season. That lovely child of the declining year,
the fringed gentian, would doubtless have been brought in with her fair
sisters, had it not been for her somewhat unmanageable name. Bryant has
written some beautiful stanzas to this flower, but in them he only calls
it a "blossom." And how fine a landscape is condensed into the two
delicious hues which we have Italicized! and yet no one ever walked i