Page:Unpublished poems by Bryant and Thoreau.djvu/20

 among the mountain-woods of Great Barrington,—after long musings under the stars. He was twenty-four or twenty-five when he thus spoke of his "greener years" as already belonging to the distant past—a mood that need not surprise us in the young man who had written Thanatopsis at the age of sixteen or seventeen; and he was thirty when he finally came to this decision, which marked the turning-point in his life.

These deciding years were also the most fruitful, in poetic production, of all his life. From 1824 to 1826 he wrote more than twice as many poems as in any other three years; and among these poems are many of his most characteristic and best, such as Autumn Woods, The Lapse of Time, Mutation, Monument Mountain, November, A Forest Hymn, The Death of the Flowers, "I cannot forget with what fervid devotion," The New Moon, The Journey of Life, and October; and especially several poems of the stars, including The Hymn to the North Star, The Song of the Stars, The Firmament, and The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. Yet it is probable that not half the poems written during these years are preserved. Bryant was