In _The Poet_ he says that verse should embody:--
"... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,
Like currents journeying through the windless deep."
His chosen field is describing and interpreting nature. He has been called
an American Wordsworth. In the following lines Bryant gives poetic
expression to his feeling that a certain maiden's heart and face reflected
the beauty of the natural scenes amid which she was reared:--
"... all the beauty of the place
Is in thy heart and on thy face.
The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy locks."
[Footnote: "O Fairest of the Rural Maids." (1820.)]
With these lines compare Wordsworth's _Three Years She Grew in Sun and
Shower_ (1799):--
"... she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."
Bryant himself says that under the influence of Wordsworth, nature suddenly
changed "into a strange freshness and life." It is no discredit to him to
have been Wordsworth's pupil or to have failed to equal the magic of
England's greatest poet of nature.
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