ng in animated,
picturesque stanzas a compact summary of the history of mankind. A young
Englishman of twenty-one--Thomas Babington Macaulay--delivered in the
same year a poem on "Evening," before the students of Trinity College,
Cambridge; and it is instructive to compare his conventional heroics
with the spirited Spenserian stanzas of William Cullen Bryant.

The lines "To a Waterfowl," which were written at Bridgewater in 1815,
were followed by "Green River," "A Winter Piece," "The West Wind," "The
Burial-Place," "Blessed are they that mourn," "No man knoweth his
Sepulchre," "A Walk at Sunset," and "The Hymn to Death."

These poems, which cover a period of six busy years, are interesting to
the poetic student as examples of the different styles of their writer,
and of the changing elements of his thoughts and feelings. "Green
River," for example, is a momentary revealment of his shy temperament
and his daily pursuits. Its glimpses of nature are charming, and his
wish to be beside its waters is the most natural one in the world. The
young lawyer is not complimentary to his clients, whom he styles "the
dregs of men," while his pen, which does its best to serve them, becomes
"a barbarous pen." He is dejected, but a visit to the river will restore
his spirits; for, as he gazes upon its lonely and lovely stream,

"An image of that calm life appears
That won my heart in my greener years."

"A Winter Piece" is a gallery of woodland pictures which anything of the
kind in the language. "A Walk at Sunset" is notable in that it is the
first poem in which we see (faintly, it must be confessed) the
aboriginal element, which was soon to become a prominent one in Mr.
Bryant's poetry. It was inseparable from the primeval forests of the New
World, but he was the first to perceive its poetic value. The "Hymn to
Death"--stately, majestic, consolatory--concludes with a touching
tribute to the worth of his good father, who died while he was writing
it, at the age of fifty-four. The year 1821 was an important one to Mr.
Bryant, for it witnessed the publication of his first collection of
verse, his marriage, and the death of his father.

The next four years of Mr. Bryant's life were more productive than any
that had preceded them, for he wrote upward of thirty poems during that
time. The aboriginal element was creative in "The Indian Girl's Lament,"
"An Indian Story," "An Indian at the Burial-Place of his Fathers," and,
noblest of