The Old church at Lenox.
written this side of the Atlantic, others doubted the rumored authorship, while all admired its nobleness of measure and its loftiness of thought. Miss Sedgwick describes Bryant at this time as "possessing a charming countenance and modest, but not bashful manners." Indeed, judging from a picture taken then, his face betrayed a delicacy of outline, a tenderness, a sympathy of thought, more in keeping with the features of a poet than a contender at law. "Alas, sir, the Muse was my first love," he wrote once, half sadly, to a friend; and, as it proved, the most prolific poetic period of his life was during the next few years, while he was wishing that he might give up his law practice. "Monument Mountain," "The Rivulet," "March," "Autumn Woods," owe their existence to this period.
Naturally cautious and calculating, he doubted his ability to support himself solely by his pen; and no wonder, —he was selling some of the masterpieces of his life at the rate of two dollars a poem. When, after nine years' stay in Berkshire, he went to New York, it was, as Prof. Nichol well says, only as "an emigrant." The Bryant of Berkshire and Cummington will live long after the Bryant of journalism has passed away.
The region in which his earlier years were spent was eminently fitted for his genius. He was by nature meditative; here was an abundance of solitude. He was given to long walks and close communion with nature; here were wild mountains, dark glens, woods, deep-flowing rivers, and sparkling brooks —he required picturesque material for his poetry; here were Indian legends in abundance. Here too, as a recent writer has said, were the picturesque customs of rural New England, now so fast dying away,— "the house-raising," "the quilting party," the old-fashioned "corn-husking" held out in the barn by lantern light, with soft seats upon piles of dry-husks, and "pumpkin pie and cider" —the former none of your squash flavor— sure to be waiting in the farmhouse near at hand. In his "Winter Piece" we catch the odor of sweet sap carried in brimming pails to where wreaths of smoke roll upward among the maples.
But Bryant was really a poet of nature and meditation rather than of customs, however picturesque. He knew every flower of Berkshire, in field or forest, and every shrub and tree. The windflower and violet, the brier-rose, the golden-rod and the gentian, were to him "a beauteous sisterhood." The sunshine on his path was his friend. Neither the chant of birds, the chime of the brook in "its endless infancy," the watercress, scarce-rooted in the swift current, nor the soft caresses of the sylvan air escaped him. Nature had something to say as well as to show. The key-note of his poetry is struck many times. It is even revealed in the closing lines of his first and greatest poem:—
"So live, that thou,
. . . . sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
Ahout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."
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There is a bit of the autumn of the hills pervading much of his writings. If his poetry is set to slow music, the melody is even the more sweet and the more majestic.
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