blank verse when at its best, as in Thanatopsis and the Forest Hymn, is extremely noble.  In gravity and dignity it is surpassed by no English blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it falls below Tennyson’s Ulysses and Morte d’Arthur.  It was characteristic of Bryant’s limitations that he came thus early into possession of his faculty.  His range was always a narrow one, and about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity, and solemnity.  His fixed position among American poets is described in his own Hymn to the North Star: 

  “And thou dost see them rise,
    Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set. 
  Alone, in thy cold skies,
    Thou keep’st thy old, unmoving station yet,
  Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train,
  Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.”

In 1821 he read The Ages, a didactic poem, in thirty-five stanzas, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, and in the same year brought out his first volume of poems.  A second collection appeared in 1832, which was printed in London under the auspices of Washington Irving.  Bryant was the first American poet who had much of an audience in England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned Thanatopsis by heart.  Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth’s school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though not precisely, to Wordsworth’s among English poets.  With no humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature.  His best poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul.  His office, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold asserts to be the peculiar office of modern poetry, “the moral interpretation of nature.”  Poems of this class are Green River, To a Water-fowl, June, the Death of the Flowers, and the Evening Wind.  The song, “O fairest of the rural maids,” which has more fancy than is common in Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth’s “Three years she grew in sun and shade,” and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be entitled—­as Wordsworth’s is in Mr. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury—­“The Education of Nature.”

Although Bryant’s career is identified with New York his poetry is all of New England.  His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berkshire hills.  There was nothing of that urban strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis.  He was, in especial, the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian Summer, that season of “dropping nuts” and “smoky light,” to whose subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease, consumption, he gave such tender expression in the Death of the Flowers, and amid whose “bright, late quiet” he wished himself to pass away.  Bryant is our poet of “the melancholy days,” as Lowell is of June.  If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day that is