As if the bright fringe of herbs on its brink, 10. Calm Trust in Providence.-"The great principle of Bryant's faith is that Eternal love doth keep in his complacent arms the earth, the air, the deep.' To set forth in strains the most attractive and lofty this glorious sentiment is the constant aim of his poetry."-H. T. Tuckerman. "He says in a letter that he felt as he walked up the hills very forlorn and desolate indeed, not knowing what was going to become of him in the big world, which grew bigger as he ascended and darker with the coming on of night. The sun had already set, leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies; and while he was looking upon the rosy splendor with rapt admiration, a solitary bird made its way along the illuminated horizon. He watched the lone wanderer until it was lost in the distance, asking himself whither it had come and to what far home it was flying. When he went to the house where he was to stop for the night, his mind was still full of what he had seen and felt, and he wrote those lines, as imperishable as our own language, The Waterfowl.' The solemn tone in which they conclude, and which by some critics has been thought too moralizing, was as much a part of the scene as the flight of the bird itself, which spoke not alone to his eye but to his soul. To have omitted that grand expression of faith and hope in a divine guidance would have been to violate the entire truth of the vision."-Parke Godwin. "This philosophy of life is a serious one; but it admits of consolation and cheerfulness. It is dreary in Byron; it is awful in Ecclesiastes; but it is neither in Bryant."-R. H. Stoddard. "There is no repining, no attempt to shield his self-love To a Water by holding Providence responsible for his hardships; still less do we find there any signs of surrender or of despair, but the same pious trust in the Divine guidance which a dozen years before had sustained him in another crisis in his career and which found such lofty expressions in the lines fowl.' His inspiration was always from above. in the stream, in the tempest, in the rainbow, in the snow, in everything about him, nature was always telling him something new of the goodness of God and forming excuses for the frail and erring."-John Bigelow. ILLUSTRATIONS. "He who, from zone to zone, In the flower, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, Will lead my steps aright."-To a Waterfowl. "Oh, no! a thousand cheerful omens give In God's magnificent works his will shall scan-— And love and peace shall make their paradise with man." Comes, like a calm upon the mid-sea brine, Hushing its billowy breast The quiet of that moment too is thine; It breathes of Him who keeps The vast and helpless city while it sleeps." -Hymn of the City. II. Profound Meditation.-"The chief of our poets of meditation, based upon observation, are Bryant and Emerson."-C. F. Richardson. "With his inimitable pictures there is ever blended high speculation or a reflective strain of moral comment.”—H. T. Tuckerman. "No boy, no young man, has ever understood his [Wordsworth's] serene and lofty genius. He touches, he moves no man, until years have brought the philosophic mind. It comes to some early, to some late, to some not at all. It came to Bryant early, and it never left him. Thanatopsis ' struck the keynote of his genius, disclosed to him the growth and grandeur of his powers, and placed him for what he was, before all American poets, past, present, and to come."—R. H. Stoddard. "But they [his juvenile efforts] do not as poetry bear witness to the real bent of his genius, or even foreshadow the characteristics of his later writings-that minute and loving observation of nature which became with him almost a religion or that profound meditative interpretation of the great movements of the universe which amounted to a kind of philosophy."-Parke Godwin. ILLUSTRATIONS. "Be it ours to meditate, In these calm shades, thy milder majesty, Learn to confirm the order of our lives." "Stainless worth, Such as the sternest age of virtue saw, -A Forest Hymn. Ripens, meanwhile, till time shall call it forth From the low modest shade, to light and bless the earth.” "I would make -The Ages. Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit Patiently by the way-side, while I traced The mazes of the pleasant wilderness Around me. She should be my counsellor, But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs -The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. 12. Fondness for Apostrophe.-As a direct corollary or sequence of Bryant's elevation and high philosophy, we find him continually indulging in apostrophe. In less dignified hands, so frequent a use of this figure would become a blemish ; but it seems entirely in accord with the spirit of the man and of his poems. ILLUSTRATIONS. "But ye, who for the living lost That agony in secret bear, Who shall with soothing words accost The strength of your despair ? ” The Living Lost. "Thou dost mark them flushed with hope, As on the threshold of their vast designs Doubtful and loose they stand, and strik'st them down." "Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven -Hymn to Death. Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart And shall not soon depart."-To a Waterfowl. LOWELL, 1819-1891 Biographical Outline.-James Russell Lowell, born at Cambridge, Mass., February 22, 1819; father a Congregational minister, and both parents of English descent; in 1827 Lowell enters the school of William Wells, near "Elmwood," as Lowell's home was called; he enters Harvard College as a Freshman in 1834, and forms there an intimate friendship with George B. Loring; he is only a fair student, but evinces an early love for literature, especially poetry; he becomes secretary of the "Hasty Pudding Club," whose records were then kept in verse; he is suspended for several months during his Senior year for neglect of studies; he passes the interval studying under a tutor at Concord, where he meets Emerson and Thoreau; he writes the poem for Class Day in 1838 (a satire on the Abolitionists and the Concord Transcendentalists), but is not allowed to read it because of his suspension, then in effect, but it is printed in pamphlet form for the class; Lowell passes his final examinations and takes A.B. with his classmates in June, 1838. At first he thinks seriously of entering the ministry and then takes up the law; by October, 1838, he is reading Blackstone" with as good a grace and as few wry faces as I may; he plans a dramatic poem on Cromwell, and regrets "being compelled to say farewell to the muses; in 1839 he writes, "I am schooling myself and shaping my theory of poetry; during 1839 he writes verses ("pottery") for the Boston Post and for the Advertiser; in December, 1839, he meets Miss Maria White, who knows more poetry than any one I am acquainted with;" he receives LL.B. from the Harvard Law School in the summer of 1840, and takes up the law more seri |