So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to bis dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.[1]
The poem which concludes with these lines, "Thanatopsis," is slightingly said by a popular critic to have for its main thought the world as a hug« sepulchre, rolling through the heavens, while its moral is to inculcate upon the death-devoted dust, which we call man, the duty of dropping into its kindred dust as quietly and gracefully as possible. So to "sacrifice to the graces" is hardly, however, the poet's wont. And this particular poem merits a higher estimate, mingling as it does so finely, a "mild and healing sympathy, that steals away their sharpness" with man's "darker musings" on the wormy grave, and with thoughts of the last bitter hour that "come like a blight over his spirit," and with "sad images of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, and breathless darkness, and the narrow house." Not a few of Mr. Bryant's admirers admire "Thanatopsis" beyond the rest of his poems; and "Thanatopsis" it is which Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his dream[2] of a generation to come, beheld "gleaming" over the dead and buried bard, "like a sculptured marble sepulchre by moonlight." And "Thanatopsis" it is, of which we are told that Dana, and other critics to whom it was shown in MS., affirmed that it could not have been written by an American—there being, says Mr. Griswold, "a finish and completeness about it, added to the grandeur and beauty of the ideas, to which, it was supposed, none of our own writers had attained." America owns another guess sort of critics, now.
As a descriptive poet, with the national characteristics of his country's scenery for a theme, those who are familiar with such characteristics, accord to Mr. Bryant lofty praise. Cis-Atlantic readers are apt to complain of a seeming lack of nationality in his pictures of lake and prairie, and to find them tame and colourless beside the impressive and vivid studies, from the same objects, of Fenimore Cooper. Bot Trans-Atlantic critics assure us, that any of our "auld warld" selves, "gifted with a small degree" of common imagination and sensibility, and free from a very large degree of prejudice and chronic amaurosis, may derive from Bryant's poems "the very awe and delight with which the first view of one of America's majestic forests would strike his mind." We are to regard him with the respect due to one who, in Wordsworth's language,
Having gained the top
Of some commanding eminence, which yet
Intruder ne'er beheld, from thence surveys
Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast
Expanse of unappropriated earth,
With mind that sheds a light on what he sees.[3]
