Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/129

MR. BRYANT'S "THIRTY POEMS" beautiful "Snow Shower"; a little further on we have "Robert of Lincoln," full of bird music and delicate humor; and, toward the middle of the volume, the finely imaginative "Song of the Sower" teems with the richness of a fruitful theme. These four poems, though cast in moulds of the author's own devising, are, with the slight exception hitherto noted, in forms as well suited to the author's genius, because as evenly and nobly balanced, as those of his well-remembered "June" and "The Conqueror's Grave."

On page 79 we find the only inelegant expression of the book:

If there are any pieces which could have been omitted from this collection, they are, "An Invitation to the Country," the "Song for New Year's Eve," "The Wind and Stream," "These Prairies Glow with Flowers," and "The Mother's Hymn." It seems to us that many feebler singers might have printed these. Nor do the two poems evoked by the present war at all compare with that ringing clarion blast, "The Song of Marion's Men," which has stirred the pulses of every school-boy in the land, and to which no bugle but that of Motherwell could ever make response.

There are two simple and affluent forms of English verse in whose mastery Mr. Bryant is without an American rival. The first is the iambic quatrain,