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the address he exhibited considerable emotion. That and the walk afterwards certainly exhausted him, and led to the swoon. He overtaxed his strength during the winter, in attending evening entertainments and in public speaking. He had few intimate acquaintances, and was so extremely modest in expressing approbation or liking that one could scarcely tell the extent of his friendly feeling. Though I had attended him for many years, and often visited him at Roslyn, and also at his old homestead in Massachusetts, I never noticed an expression of more than ordinary friendship till I was prostrated by sickness. He made an impression ordinarily of coldness, but his poems show that he had plenty of feeling, and great sympathy for mankind.

"Once when at Roslyn we visited the grave of his wife in the village cemetery, and we saw the place by her side reserved for him. He frequently requested that his funeral should be simple and

without ostentation. He has had fulfilled his wish to die in June.

"Mr. Bryant owed his long life to an exceedingly tenacious and tough constitution and very prudent living. I always found him an early riser. Although he was slight of body and limb, he seemed to me unconscious of fatigue, and he would walk many a stronger man off his legs. did not walk rapidly, but seemed as wiry as an Indian."

He

In April, 1867, Mr. Bryant expressed to the writer a wish that he might not survive the loss of his mental faculties, like Southey, Scott, Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick Shepherd, who all suffered from softening of the brain, and mentioned his hope that he should be permitted to complete his translation of Homer before death or mental imbecility, with a failure of physical strength, should overtake him. On another occasion he said, "If I am worthy, I would wish for sudden death, with no interregnum between I cease to exercise reason and I cease to exist." In these wishes he was happily gratified, as well as in the time of his being laid away to his final rest, as expressed in his beautiful and characteristic lines to JUNE:

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"I gazed upon the glorious sky,

And the green mountains round,
And thought that when I came to lie
At rest within the ground,

"T were pleasant that in flowery June,
When brooks send up a cheerful tune,

And groves a cheerful sound,

The sexton's hand, my grave to make,

The rich, green mountain turf should break."*

It was indeed a glorious day, and the daisies were dancing and glimmering over the fields as the poet's family, a few old friends, and the villagers saw him laid in his last restingplace at Roslyn, after a few words fitly spoken by his pastor, and beheld his coffin covered with roses and other summer flowers by a little band of country children, who gently dropped them as they circled round the poet's grave. This act completed, we left the aged minstrel amid the melody dearest of all to him in life, - the music of the gentle June breezes murmuring through the tree-tops, from whence also came the songs of summer birds.

The following, from the pen of Paul H. Hayne, of South Carolina, is one of the many tributes to Mr. Bryant's character and genius, that have appeared since the poet's death, from the pens of Curtis, Holland, Osgood, Powers, Stedman, Stoddard, Street, Symington (a Scottish singer), and many others:

"Lo! there he lies, our Patriarch Poet, dead!

The solemn angel of eternal peace

Has waved a wand of mystery o'er his head,

Touched his strong heart, and bade his pulses cease.

*The entire poem may be found on page 425.

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I cannot forbear adding to this expression of appreciative affection a few words from the funeral address uttered by his pastor, the Rev. Dr. Bellows, at the commemorative ceremony held in New York, on the 14th of June, at All Souls' Church, of which Mr. Bryant was for the last fifteen years of his life an active and honored member. Dr. Bellows said :

“Never, perhaps, was there an instance of such precocity in point of wisdom and maturity as that which marked Thanatopsis, written at eighteen, or of such persistency in judgment, force, and melody as that exhibited in his last public ode, written at eighty-three, on occasion of Washington's last birthday. Between these two bounds lies one even path, high, finished, faultless, in which comes a succession of poems, always meditative, always steeped in the love and knowledge of nature, always pure and melodious, always stamped with his sign manual of faultless taste and gem-like purity. . . .

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A devoted lover of religious liberty, he was an equal lover of religion itself—not in any precise dogmatic form, but in its righteousness, reverence, and charity. . . .

"It is the glory of this man, that his character outshone even his great talent and his large fame. Distinguished equally for his native gifts and his consummate culture, his poetic inspiration and his exquisite art, he is honored and loved to-day even more for his stainless purity of life, his unswerving rectitude of will, his devotion to the higher interests of his race, his unfeigned patriotism, and his broad humanity. . .

"The increasing sweetness and beneficence of his character, meanwhile, must have struck his familiar friends. His last years were his devoutest and most humane years. He became beneficent as he grew able to be so, and his hand was open to all just needs and to many unreasonable claimants."

No more appropriate concluding paragraph can be added to this memorial paper, which I could wish worthier of the good and gifted Bryant - Integer vitæ scelerisque purus than his own beautiful words, applied to his contemporary, Washington Irving. "If it were becoming," said the poet, "to address our departed friend as if in his immediate presence, I would say, 'Farewell, thou who hast entered into the rest prepared from the foundation of the world for serene and gentle spirits like thine. Farewell, happy in thy life, happy in thy death, happier in the reward to which that death is the assured passage; fortunate in attracting the admiration of the world to thy beautiful writings; still more fortunate in having written nothing which did not tend to promote the reign of magnanimous forbearance and generous sympathies among thy fellow-men. The brightness of that enduring fame which thou hast won on earth is but a shadowy symbol of the glory to which thou art admitted in the world beyond the grave. Thy errand on earth was an errand of peace and good-will to men, and thou art now in a region where hatred and strife never enter, and where the harmonious activity of those who inhabit it acknowledges no impulse less noble or less pure than love."

NEW YORK, July, 1878.

JAMES GRANT WILSON.

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Thow who wouldst wear the name

Of Poet mider thy brethren of mankind,
And clothe, in words of flame,

Thoughts that shall live within the general rund/
Deem not the framing of a deathless lay
The pastime of a drowsy Summer days

But gather all thy Powers,

And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave,
And, in thy lonely hours.

At Kilent morning or at wakeful eve
While the traton Current lingles throughthy veins,
Set forth the burning world in flicens strains.

No smooth array of phrases
Artfully sought and ordered though it be
Which the cold rhymer lagel

Upon the page urste langued industry,
Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed,
Or fill, with seedden teore, the eyes that read,

The secret wouldst thou know
To touch the heart or fire the blood at will,
Let thine leyes derflow,

Let thy lept queverwitte the passionate thrill,
Seize the great thought ere yet its power be past,
And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast.

Then, should thy verse appear Halting and harsh and all snaptly wrought, Touch the crude line with fear,

Save in the moment of impassioned thoughts Then summon back the orginal glar and mend The train with Expture that with fire was penned

Yet let no empty gust

Of passion find an utter ance in thy lays

A blast that whirls the dust

Along the howling Street and died away; Per feelings of calm power and mighty Sweep, Like carrents journeying through the windless deep.

To limn the beauty of the earth and sky?
Before this inner gaze.

Let all that beauty in clear vision liet
Look on it with exceeding love and write
The words inspired by wonder and delight

Of tempests wouldst those King. Arlett of battles, make thyself a part Of the great tumults cling

To the tossed wreck with terror in they haurt Scale, with the assaulting host, the campert's height, efnd Strike and struggle in the thickest fight

So shalt then frame alay
Which haply may endure from age to age)
And they who read shall say:

"What witching hangs upon this poot's page!
"What art is his the written spells to find
"That way, from hood to hood, the willing sind!"
William Cullen Pryant

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