He has caught, according to Tuckerman, the very spirit of American scenery, as well as faithfully pictured its details—"his best poems have anthem-like cadence, which accords with the vast scenes they celebrate"—"his harp is strung in harmony with the wild moan of the ancient boughs"—his forest studies are not English parks formalised by arty not legendary wilds like Ravenna's pine-grove, not gloomy German forests with their phantoms and banditti—but they realise those "primal dense woodlands" of the New World (whose title of New seems a libel on their hoary eld) where "the oak spreads its enormous branches, and the frost-kindled leaves of the maple glow like flame in the sunshine; where the tap of the woodpecker and the whirring of the partridge alone break the silence that broods, like the spirit of prayer, amid the interminable aisles of the verdant sanctuary." And Washington Irving claims for his friend's descriptive poetry, the power of transporting us at will into the depths of the solemn primæval 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." Nevertheless, we own to a sense of general dulness and disappointment when doing our best to catch the inspiration of the "Forest Hymn," nor do we find in his picture of "The Prairies," those Gardens of the Desert, those
Unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
any such "proof impression" of the poet's art, as the subject seems capable of. Very graphic, however, are the lines—
Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever.—Motionless?—
No—they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges.
Mr. Bryant's residence in Queen's County,[1] as described by pencillers
- ↑ His house is at the foot of a woody hill, facing Hempstead Harbour, to which the flood tide gives the appearance of a lake, bordered to its very edge with trees. The house itself, surrounded with "square columns and a heavy cornice," which help to shade "a wide and ample piazza," is described ("Homes of American Authors," 1852) as "one bower of greenery," July's hottest sun leaving the inner rooms "cool and comfortable at all times." The library, as the haunt of the poet and his friends, is "supplied with all that can minister to quiet and refined pleasure," in addition to books. "Here, by the great table covered with periodicals and literary novelties, with the soft, ceaseless music of rustling leaves, and the singing of birds making the silence sweeter, the summer visitor may fancy himself in the very woods, only with a deeper and more grateful shade; and when 'wintry blasts are piping loud,' and the whispering trees have changed to whirling ones, a bright wood-fire lights the home scene, enhanced in comfort by the hospitable sky without, and the domestic lamp calls about it a smiling or musing circle, for whose conversation or silence the shelves around afford excellent
