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. He did not walk rapidly, but seemed as wiry as an Indian." 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: "I gazed upon the glorious sky, And the green mountains round, "T were pleasant that in flowery June, 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. "Behold, in marble quietude he lies! Pallid and cold, divorced from earthly breath, "Well may they smile; for death, to such as he, Lifts to song's fadeless heaven his star-like fame!" 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. . . . "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. The Poet. Thow who wouldst wear the Thame Of Port midst thy brethren of mankind And Clothe, in words of flame, Thoughts that shall live within the general mund Deem not the framing of a deathless lay The padtime of a drowdy Cummer-day Bur-gather all thy Powers, And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave, At Vilent morning or at wakeful eve No smooth array of phrases Upon the page wrste languid industry, The secret wouldst thou know Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill, Then, should thy verse appear Halling and harsh and all unaptly wrought, Touch the crude line with fear. Save in the moment of impassioned thoughts Then summon bock the orginal glas and mund The train with rapture that with five was penned Yet let no empty gust Of passion find an utterance in thy lay, A blast that whirls the dust. Along the howling street and died away; To limn the beauty of the earth and sky? Let all that beauty in clear vision lies Of tempests wouldst those King. To the tossed wreck with terror in thy haupt Scale, with the assaulting host, the tampart's height, eAnd Strike and Struggle in the thickest fight. So shalt then frame alay #77 hat witetiong hangs upon this poots paze ! Copied, Occr. 1875. |