Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/326

310 He has caught, according to Tuckerman, the very spirit of American scenery, as well as faithfully pictured its details—"his best poems have anthem-like cadence, which accords with the vast scenes they celebrate"—"his harp is strung in harmony with the wild moan of the ancient boughs"—his forest studies are not English parks formalised by arty not legendary wilds like Ravenna's pine-grove, not gloomy German forests with their phantoms and banditti—but they realise those "primal dense woodlands" of the New World (whose title of New seems a libel on their hoary eld) where "the oak spreads its enormous branches, and the frost-kindled leaves of the maple glow like flame in the sunshine; where the tap of the woodpecker and the whirring of the partridge alone break the silence that broods, like the spirit of prayer, amid the interminable aisles of the verdant sanctuary." And Washington Irving claims for his friend's descriptive poetry, the power of transporting us at will into the depths of the solemn primæval forest, to the shores of the lonely lake, the banks of the wild nameless stream, or the brow of the rocky upland, rising like a promontory from amidst a wide ocean of foliage." Nevertheless, we own to a sense of general dulness and disappointment when doing our best to catch the inspiration of the "Forest Hymn," nor do we find in his picture of "The Prairies," those Gardens of the Desert, thoseany such "proof impression" of the poet's art, as the subject seems capable of. Very graphic, however, are the lines—

Mr. Bryant's residence in Queen's County, as described by pencillers