But these, while well wrought in the formal eighteenth-century fashion, showed no special originality.  It was with ‘Thanatopsis,’ written in 1811, when he was only seventeen, that his career as a poet of original and assured strength began.  ‘Thanatopsis’ was an inspiration of the primeval woods of America, of the scenes that surrounded the writer in youth.  At the same time it expressed with striking independence and power a fresh conception of “the universality of Death in the natural order.”  As has been well said, “it takes the idea of death out of its theological aspects and restores it to its proper place in the vast scheme of things.  This in itself was a mark of genius in a youth of his time and place.”  Another American poet, Stoddard, calls it the greatest poem ever written by so young a man.  The author’s son-in-law and biographer, Parke Godwin, remarks upon it aptly, “For the first time on this continent a poem was written destined to general admiration and enduring fame;” and this indeed is a very significant point, that it began the history of true poetry in the United States,—­a fact which further secured to Bryant his exceptional place.  The poem remains a classic of the English language, and the author himself never surpassed the high mark attained in it; although the balanced and lasting nature of his faculty is shown in a pendant to this poem, which he created in his old age and entitled ‘The Flood of Years.’  The last is equal to the first in dignity and finish, but is less original, and has never gained a similar fame.

Another consideration regarding Bryant is, that representing a modern development of poetry under American inspiration, he was also a descendant of the early Massachusetts colonists, being connected with the Pilgrim Fathers through three ancestral lines.  Born at Cummington, Massachusetts, November 3d, 1794, the son of a stalwart but studious country physician of literary tastes, he inherited the strong religious feeling of this ancestry, which was united in him with a deep and sensitive love of nature.  This led him to reflect in his poems the strength and beauty of American landscape, vividly as it had never before been mirrored; and the blending of serious thought and innate piety with the sentiment for nature so reflected gave a new and impressive result.

Like many other long-lived men, Bryant suffered from delicate health in the earlier third of his life:  there was a tendency to consumption in his otherwise vigorous family stock.  He read much, and was much interested in Greek literature and somewhat influenced by it.  But he also lived a great deal in the open air, rejoiced in the boisterous games and excursions in the woods with his brothers and sisters, and took long rambles alone among the hills and wild groves; being then, as always afterwards, an untiring walker.  After a stay of only seven months at Williams College, he studied law, which he practiced for some eight years in Plainfield and Great Barrington.  In the