There are many more lines equally good, but we have not space for them.  This is a description of winter as we have it here, compounded of the elements of extreme cold, a transparent atmosphere, and brilliant sunshine.  No English poet can see such a scene, at least in his own country:  Ambrose Phillips did see something like it in Sweden, and described it in a poetical epistle to the Earl of Dorset, which is much the best thing he ever wrote, and has a pulse of truth and life in it, from the simple fact that he saw something new, and told his noble correspondent what he saw.

But Bryant’s claims to the honors of a truly national poet do not rest solely upon the fidelity with which he has described the peculiar scenery of his native land, for no poet has expressed with more earnestness of conviction and more beauty of language the great ideas which have moulded our political institutions and our social life.  Before the breaking out of the Civil War he was a member of that great political party of which Jefferson was the head, and he is still a Democrat in the primitive sense of the word; that is to say, he believes in man’s capacity for self-government, and in his right to govern himself.  He has full trust in human progress; age has not lessened the faith with which he looks forward to the future; his sympathies are with the many, and not with the few.  Though he has travelled much in Europe, his imagination has been but little affected by the forms of beauty and grandeur which past ages have bequeathed to the present.  He has not found inspiration in the palace, the cathedral, the ruined castle, the ivy-covered church, the rose-embowered cottage.  Indeed, it is only by incidental and occasional touches that one would learn from his poetry that he had ever been out of his own country at all:  his inspiration and his themes are alike drawn from the scenery, the institutions, the history of his native land.  His imagination, as was the case with Milton, rests upon a basis of gravity deepening into sternness; and we have little doubt that not a few of the things in Europe, which move to pleasure the lightly stirred fancy of many American travellers, aroused in him a different feeling, as either memorials of an age or expressions of a system in which the many were sacrificed to the few.  In his mental frame there is a pulse of indignation which is easily stirred against any form of injustice or oppression.  His later poems, as might naturally be expected, are those in which the sentiments and aspirations of a patriotic and hopeful American are most distinctly expressed; among them are “The Battle-Field,” “The Winds,” “The Antiquity of Freedom,” and that which is called, from its first line, “O Mother of a Mighty Race.”  It would be well to read these poems in connection with the seventeenth chapter of the second volume of De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which treats of the sources of poetry among democratic nations; and the comparison will furnish fresh cause for admiring the prophetic sagacity of that great philosophical thinker, who, at the time he wrote, predicted all our future, because he comprehended all our past.