virgin orb in the blue western main."

{515}

In 1821 he read the _Ages_, a didactic poem in thirty-five stanzas,
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year
brought out his first volume of poems. A second collection appeared in
1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington
Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience
in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned _Thanatopsis_ by
heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's
school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though
not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor,
with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or
openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere
imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best
poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its
calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His
office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be
the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the moral interpretation of
nature." Poems of this class are _Green River_, _To a Waterfowl_,
_June_, the _Death of the Flowers_, 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 {516} 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 t