“simply perfect from its own resource,
  As to the bee the new campanula’s
  Illuminate seclusion swung in air.”

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of June, in which he speaks of himself, by anticipation, as of one

  “Whose part in all the pomp that fills
  The circuit of the summer hills
  Is—­that his grave is green.”

Bryant is, par excellence, the poet of New England wild flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian—­to each of which he dedicated an entire poem—­the orchis and the golden-rod, “the aster in the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook.”  With these his name will be associated as Wordsworth’s with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, and Emerson’s with the rhodora.

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as these famous ones from The Battle-Field: 

  “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;
    The eternal years of God are hers;
  But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
    And dies among his worshipers.”

He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new collection in 1840, another in 1844, and Thirty Poems in 1864.  His work at all ages was remarkably even. Thanatopsis was as mature as any thing that he wrote afterward, and among his later pieces the Planting of the Apple Tree and the Flood of Years were as fresh as any thing that he had written in the first flush of youth.  Bryant’s poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of affectation or extravagance.  His prose writings are not important, consisting mainly of papers of the Salmagundi variety contributed to the Talisman, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, Tales of the Glauber Spa, 1832; and impressions of Europe, entitled Letters of a Traveler, issued in two series, in 1849 and 1858.  In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version of Homer in the English tongue.  Bryant’s half-century of service as the editor of a daily paper should not be overlooked.  The Evening Post, under his management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, and did much to raise the tone of journalism in New York.