Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/137

MR. BRYANTS "THIRTY POEMS" production, "The Ruins of Italica"; and "The Lost Bird" (by Carolina Colorado de Perry) is suggestive and melodious as the Spanish lyric itself.

Throughout the volume are evidences of a serene and joyous prime, which age cannot wither, nor the rust of years corrode. "The Life that Is," "A Sick Bed," "The New and the Old," "The Cloud on the Way," are all recognitions of the season to which the singer and his life-companions have arrived; but they breathe compliance with the sweet law of Nature's successions, and are radiant with faith that looks beyond the vail. His philosophy, like his poetic art, resembles a tranquil river still widening toward the close.

And now, in a brief and merely suggestive review, how little fault we have been able to find with these Thirty Poems! Their excellences have grown upon us; for their author incases himself in proof, and is open to few charges, save that of being " faultily faultless." They have the effect of Kensett's pictures—cool, rich, dark, satisfying, a welcome relief from the feverish midday glare, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. With all this, such a burden of rhymes now loads the press, that it is doubtful whether, if Mr. Bryant were for the first time craving the public suffrage, he would assume a central position in the hemicycle of our poets. For the unusual, not the noblest, is in vogue. It was much for him to have commenced in that fallow-period of American literature, when any writer was noticeable; and fortunate that his sure excellence thus [123]