"
We may say of Bryant what was true of Cooper, that when he enters a forest,
power seems to come unbidden to his pen. Bryant's _Forest Hymn_ (1825)
finds God in those green temples:--
"Thou art in the soft winds
That run along the summit of these trees
In music."
He points out the divinity that shapes our ends in:--
"That delicate forest flower,
With scented breath and look so like a smile."
No Puritan up to this time had represented God in a guise more pleasing
than the smile of a forest flower. This entire _Hymn_ seems like a great
prayer rooted deep in those earlier prayers to which the boy used to
listen.
Although Bryant lived to be eighty-four, he wrote less poetry than Keats,
who died at the age of twenty-five, and about one third as much as Shelley,
who was scarcely thirty when he was drowned. It is not length of days that
makes a poet. Had Bryant died in his thirtieth year, his excellence and
limitations would be fairly well shown in his work finished at that time.
At this age, in addition to the five poems in his 1821 volume (p. 139), he
had written _The Winter Piece_, _A Forest Hymn_, and _The Death of the
Flowers_.
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