160. In silence from: in 1821, "Unnoticed by"; in 1832, "Unheeded by"; the present reading was adopted in 1855. ¶ 71. In 1821:

The bow'd with age, the infant in the smiles

And beauty of its innocent age cut off;

in 1832, "And the sweet babe, and the gray-headed man"; the present reading was adopted in 1871. 75. which: in 1821, "that"; the present reading was adopted in 1855. 76. that mysterious realm: in 1821, "the pale realms of shade"; the present reading was adopted in 1832.

(181) THE YELLOW VIOLET. Cf. Wordsworth's "To the Daisy" (first poem), especially stanzas 3, 4, 7.

(182) INSCRIPTION FOR THE ENTRANCE TO A WOOD. First published in The North American Review, September, 1817. "The wood referred to was at Cummington, Mass., nearly in front of the house now known as the Bryant Homestead.”— Godwin. 6-11. Cf. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 11. 22-30:

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration.

26-28. Cf. Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring," ll. II, 12:

And 't is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

(183) 39. water: here the poem in its first form ended.

(183) TO A WATERFOWL. First published in The North American Review, March, 1818. The poem was written on December 15, 1815, in Plainfield, Mass., where the poet had gone to make inquiries about beginning there the practice of the law. "He says in a letter that he felt, as he walked up the hills, very forlorn and desolate indeed, not knowing what was to become of him in the big world. . . . . The sun had already set, leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies; and while he was looking upon the rosy splendor with rapt admiration, a solitary bird made wing along the illuminated horizon. He watched the lone wanderer until it was lost in the distance, asking himself whither it had come and to what far home it was flying. When he went to the house where he was to stop for the night, his mind was still full of what he had seen and felt, and he wrote those lines, as imperishable as our language, 'The Waterfowl.""-Godwin's life of Bryant, Vol. I, pp. 143, 144. T7. seen against: the reading of the first form was "painted on"; a friend objecting that this was inconsistent with "floats" (1. 8), the poet changed it to "limned upon," then to "shadowed on," and finally to the present reading.

(184) 31. tread: in 1818, "trace."

(187) OH FAIREST OF THE RURAL MAIDS. "This poem was addressed, the

year before their marriage, to the lady who became Mrs. Bryant."-Godwin. Cf. Wordsworth's "Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower," especially stanzas 3-5:

She shall be sportive as the fawn
That, wild with glee, across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;

And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm,

Of mute insensate things.

The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her, for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the storm

Grace that shall mould the maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face

(189) MONUMENT MOUNTAIN. "The mountain called by this name is a remarkable precipice in Great Barrington, overlooking the rich and picturesque valley of the Housatonic, in the western part of Massachusetts. At the southern extremity is, or was a few years since, a conical pile of small stones, erected, according to the tradition of the surrounding country, by the Indians, in memory of a woman of the Stockbridge tribe, who killed herself by leaping from the edge of the precipice. Until within a few years past, small parties of that tribe used to arrive from their settlement in the western part of the state of New York, on visits to Stockbridge, the place of their nativity and former residence. A young woman belonging to one of these parties related, to a friend of the author, the story on which the poem of 'Monument Mountain' is founded."-Note in the 1832 edition.

(192) A FOREST HYMN. First published in The Literary Gazette. "This was the last poem that Mr. Bryant wrote during his residence in the country, just before his removal to New York."—Godwin.

(193) 38-47. Cf. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," ll. 93-102:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.

(194) 66–68. Cf. the lines quoted above; also Shelley's "Adonais" (1821), 11. 478-82:

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,

That Benediction which the clipsing curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove

(195) 97-101. Cf. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," ll. 107-11:

well pleased to recognize

In Nature, and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

(195) JUNE. "After taking up his residence in New York in 1825, Mr. Bryant made a brief visit to Great Barrington, where he had lived for ten years. During this farewell visit this poem was suggested to him; and, fifty-two years later, when his death occurred in the month of June, it was generally remarked how its tender wishes had turned into prophecy. He was buried in a rural cemetery at Roslyn amid the sights and sounds, 'Soft airs and song and light and bloom,' for which he supposes his soul would yearn even after death."-Godwin.

(197) A SUMMER RAMBLE. Cf. Wordsworth's "To My Sister":

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before;

The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,

Which seems a sense of joy to yield

To the bare trees and mountains bare

And grass in the green field.

My sister ('t is a wish of mine),
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign,

Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you: and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book, for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate

Our living calendar:

We from to-day, my friend, will date

The opening of the year.

Love, now a universal birth,

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth:

It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason:

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,

Which they shall long obey;

We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,

We 'll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

Then, come, my sister; come, I pray;

With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book, for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

(200) SONG OF MARION'S MEN. General Francis Marion, at the head of a few daring troops, carried on an irregular warfare with the British forces, in South Carolina, during the last years of the Revolutionary War, making night-attacks and other forays from forest and swamp; the British were so harassed by him “that they sent an officer to remonstrate with him for not coming into the open field and fighting 'like a gentleman and a Christian'" (Bryant).

(202) 49. Santee: the principal river of South Carolina.

(202) THE PRAIRIES. "Mr. Bryant first saw the great prairies of the West in 1832, while on a visit to his brothers, who were among the early settlers of the State of Illinois. This poem was the result of his visit.”—Godwin. The poet rode for about a hundred miles over the prairies, on horseback. ¶ 10-15. "The prairies of the West, with an undulating surface, rolling prairies, as they are called, present to the unaccustomed eye a singular spectacle when the shadows of the clouds are passing rapidly over them: the face of the ground seems to fluctuate and toss like billows of the sea."-Bryant.

(203) 21. Sonora: one of the states of Mexico, bordering on the Gulf of California. 48. Pentelicus: a mountain near Athens, from which marble was quarried. 149. its rack: the Acropolis of Athens.

(204) 64. gopher: a small burrowing rodent.

(207) THE WIND AND STREAM. First published in The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1857.

(208) THE DEATH OF LINCOLN. "Written, at the request of the Committee of Arrangements, when the body of the murdered President was carried in funeral procession through the city of New York, April, 1865."-Godwin.

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

"This gentleman's poetry has found its way, piece-meal, into England, and having met with a little of our newspaper praise, which has been repeated with great emphasis in America, is now set up among his associates for a poet of extraordinary promise, on the ground of having produced, within the course of several years, about fifty duodecimo pages of poetry, such as we shall give a specimen of. Mr. B. is not, and never will be, a great poet. He wants fire-he wants the very rashness of a poet-the prodigality and fervour of those who are overflowing with inspiration. Mr. B., in fact, is a sensible young man, of a thrifty disposition, who knows how to manage a few plain ideas in a very handsome way.

Some lines, about fifteen or twenty, to a 'water-fowl,' which are very beautiful, to be sure, but with no more poetry in them than there is in the Sermon on the Mount, are supposed, by his countrymen, 'to be well known in Europe.'”—-John Neal, in Blackwood's Magazine, September, 1824.

"We should think

that he were formed rather for the beautiful than the sublime, rather for pensive tenderness than deep and harrowing pathos, rather for the effusions of fancy and feeling than for the creations of a bold and fertile imagination. The diction of these poems is unobjectionable-and that is saying a great deal. It is simple and natural-there is no straining after effect, no meretricious glare, no affected point and brilliancy. It is clear and precise-Mr. Bryant does not seem to think mysticism any element of the true sublime, or the finest poetry at all inconsistent with common sense. It is idiomatic and racy."-The Southern Review, February, 1832.

....

"The faults of this poet are the same in kind, but not in degree, with those of Willis. He belongs to the same school [the English Lake School], though he does not carry its peculiarities to such a fanatical extent. His versification is formed upon the same quaint and sluggish model; but he oftener deviates from it, and infuses into it a degree of spirit which renders many of his productions not unpleasing to those who are fond of poring over sentimental stanzas or fragments in prosing blank verse. But we wish not to prejudice our readers against Mr. Bryant's poetry. Throughout the principal part of the effusions before us, he exhibits a manliness of thought and a facility of expression which, after the perusal of Willis's rhapsodies, we found a real relief to our jaded faculties. Mr. Bryant, although he generally uses the prosaic diction of the Lake School, keeps tolerably clear of its abstruse manner of thinking; and but seldom indulges in the conceits and occult meanings so prevalent in the poetry of that school, particularly as it is written by Shelley, Keats, Willis, and Percival. He also avoids the contemptible affectation of infantile simplicity with which Wordsworth so often degrades his pages; but he has none of this amiable but heavy poet's original vein of philosophical reflection on the dispositions of man, and but little of his graphical power in depicting the appearances of nature."-The American Quarterly Review, March, 1832. "They appear to me to belong to the best school of English poetry, and to be entitled to rank among the highest of their class. The same keen eye and fresh feeling for nature, the same indigenous style of thinking and local peculiarity of imagery which give such novelty and interest to the pages of that gifted writer [Cooper] will be found to characterize this volume, condensed into a narrower compass and sublimated into poetry. The descriptive writings of Mr. Bryant are essentially American. They transport us into the depths of the solemn primeval forest-to the shores of the lonely lake-the banks of the wild nameless stream, or the brow of the rocky upland rising like a promontory from amidst a wide ocean of foliage; while they shed around us the glories of a climate fierce in its extremes but splendid in all its vicissitudes. His close observation of the phenomena of nature, and the graphic felicity of his details, prevent his descriptions from ever becoming general and commonplace; while he has the gift of shedding over them a pensive grace that blends them all into harmony, and of clothing them with moral associations that make them speak to the heart."-Washington Irving, in the Dedication of the London edition of Bryant's "Poems," 1832.

....

"To the American scenery and woodland characters, then, let us first of all turn; and while here we find much to please, we must strongly express our dissent from