estined to be the delight of thousands of readers.

"In this way I suppose Halleck to have attained the gracefulness of
his diction, and the airy melody of his numbers. In this way I believe
he wrought up his verses to that transparent clearness of expression
which causes the thought to be seen through them without any
interposing dimness, so that the thought and the phrase seem one, and
the thought enters the mind like a beam of light. I suppose that
Halleck's time being taken up by the tasks of his vocation, he
naturally lost by degrees the habit of composing in this manner, and
that he found it so necessary to the perfection of what he wrote that
he adopted no other in its place.

"Whatever was the reason that Halleck ceased so early to write, let us
congratulate ourselves that he wrote at all. Great authors often
overlay and almost smother their own fame by the voluminousness of
their writings. So great is their multitude, and so rich is the
literature of our language, that for frequent readings we are obliged
to content ourselves with mere selections from the works of best and
most beloved of our poets, even those who have not written much. It is
only a few of their works that dwell and live in the general mind.
Gray, for example, wrote little, and of that little one short poem,
his _Elegy_, can be fairly said to survive in the public admiration,
and that poem I have sometimes heard called the most popular in our
language."

LII

THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS

Thanatopsis may be said to be the most remarkable poem written by an
American youth. "The unfailing wonder of it is," writes an American
critic in a magazine article, "that a boy of seventeen could have
written it; not merely that he could have made verse of such
structural beauty and dignity, but that the thoughts of which it is
compacted could have been a boy's thoughts. The poem seems to have
been written while he was at his father's house in Cummington, in the
summer of 1811, before he had definitely begun the study of law. Fond
as he had been of showing his earlier effusions to his father and
others, the consciousness of having done something different and
greater must have come upon him at this time, for it was only by
accident, six years after the writing of _Thanatopsis_, that his
father chanced to find it and the poem now called _An Inscription Upon
the Entrance to a Wood_, among some papers in a desk the boy had used
while at home. Dr. Br