weeping strangers—the fragrant birch hanging her tassels above him, and the blossoms nodding carelessly, and the redbreast warbling cheerily:[1]
But there was weeping far away;
And gentle eyes for him,
With watching many an anxious day
Were sorrowful and dim.
They little knew, who loved him so,
The fearful death he met,
When shouting o'er the desert snow,
Unarmed, and hard beset;—
Nor how, when round the frosty pole
The northern dawn was red,
The mountain wolf and wild-cat stole
To banquet on the dead.
*****
But long they looked, and feared, and wept,
Within his distant home;
And dreamed, and started as they slept,
For joy that he was come.
These lines are a fine specimen of the condensed, pithy, chaste picturesqueness of expression in which Mr. Bryant excels. A corresponding terseness as well as delicacy distinguishes his similitudes, which if sparsely, are almost ever effectively introduced, and evidence true feeling and taste. The breeze at summer twilight he bids
go forth,
God's blessing breathed upon the fainting earth.[2]
The intellectual prowess of man he suggests by the discoveries of the astronomer—
he whose eye
Unwinds the eternal dances of the sky.[3]
To a maiden sinking under a decline he says—
Glide softly to thy rest then; Death should come
Gently to one of gentle mould like thee,
As light winds wandering through groves of bloom
Detach the delicate blossom from the tree.[4]
When "frosts and shortening days portend the aged year is near his end," then does the gentian flower's
Sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue—blue—as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.[5]
Man, a probationer between two eternities, is thus apostrophised:
- ↑ The couplet,is deservedly admired.
"And fearless near the fatal spot
Her young the partridge led," - ↑ To the Evening Wind.
- ↑ The Ages.
- ↑ Sonnets.
- ↑ To the Fringed Gentian.
