Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/324

308 weeping strangers—the fragrant birch hanging her tassels above him, and the blossoms nodding carelessly, and the redbreast warbling cheerily:

These lines are a fine specimen of the condensed, pithy, chaste picturesqueness of expression in which Mr. Bryant excels. A corresponding terseness as well as delicacy distinguishes his similitudes, which if sparsely, are almost ever effectively introduced, and evidence true feeling and taste. The breeze at summer twilight he bids

The intellectual prowess of man he suggests by the discoveries of the astronomer—

To a maiden sinking under a decline he says—When "frosts and shortening days portend the aged year is near his end," then does the gentian flower'sMan, a probationer between two eternities, is thus apostrophised: