he
summer day that is

"--simply perfect from its own resource
As to the bee the new campanula's
Illuminate seclusion swung in air."

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast
the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of
deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks
of himself, by anticipation, as of one

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is--that his grave is green."

{517} Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild
flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he
dedicated an entire poem--the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in
the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name
will be associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser
celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora.

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there
are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as
these famous ones from the _Battle Field_:

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshipers."

He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new
collection in 1840, another in 1844, and _Thirty Poems_ in 1864. His
work at all ages was remarkably even. _Thanatopsis_ was as mature as
any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces, the
_Planting of the Apple Tree_ and the _Flood of Years_ were as fresh as
any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's
poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of
affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important,
consisting mainly of papers of the _Salmagundi_ variety contributed to
the _Talisman_, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy
stories, _Tales of the {518} Glauber Spa_, 1832; and impressions of
Europe, entitled, _Letters of a Traveler_, issued in two series, in
1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations
of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, a remarkable achievement for a man of his
age, and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version
of Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half century of service as
the editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked. The _Evening
Post_, under his management, was always honest, gen