Here is nothing new.  It is the old, sad strain, of coeval birth with poetry itself.  It may be read in the Hebrew of the Book of Job and in the Greek of Homer:  but with what dignity of sentiment, what majestic music, what beauty of language, the oft-repeated lesson of humanity is enforced!  Every word is chosen with unerring judgment, and no needless dilution of language weakens the force of the conceptions and pictures.  Bryant is one of the few poets who will bear the test of the well-nigh obsolete art of verbal criticism:  observe the expressions, “silent fame,” “forgotten arts,” “wisdom disappeared”:  how exactly these epithets satisfy the ear and the mind! how impossible to change any one of them for the better!

In Bryant’s descriptive poems there is the same finished execution and the same beauty of style as in his reflective and didactic poems, with more originality of treatment.  It was his fortune to be born and reared in the western part of Massachusetts, and to become familiar with some of the most beautiful inland scenery of New England in youth and early manhood, when the mind takes impressions which the attrition of life never wears out.  In his study of Nature he combines the faculty and the vision, the eye of the naturalist and the imagination of the poet.  No man observes the outward shows of earth and sky more accurately; no man feels them more vividly; no man describes them more beautifully.  He was the first of our poets who, deserting the conventional paths in which imitators move, studied and delineated Nature as it exists in New England, modified by the elements of a comparatively low latitude, a brilliant sky, uncertain springs, short and hot summers, richly colored autumns, and winters of pure and crystal cold.  The merit and the popularity of Bryant’s descriptive poetry prove how intimate is the relation between imagination and truth, and how the poet who is faithful to the highest requisitions of his art must obey laws as rigid as those of science itself.  Here, at the risk of making our readers read again what they may have read before, we transcribe a passage from a memorandum of Mr. Morritt’s, containing an account of Scott’s proceedings while studying the localities of “Rokeby":—­

“I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended Cave of Grey Denzil, and could not help saying, that, as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining.  I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, ’that in Nature no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of Nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to his imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth.’”