Page:Unpublished poems by Bryant and Thoreau.djvu/21

 the sternest critic of his own writings. Of a series of three odes, written a few years earlier, he has included only one in his works. Of the many poems written for Miss Fairchild, before she became Mrs. Bryant, we have but one—"O Fairest of the rural maids." So it may well be that in choosing for publication only what he considered his best, he rejected, in this important period, many characteristic poems which, in view of the small total amount of his work, we can ill afford to lose. Musings would seem to be one of these. Though in the case of Bryant it is particularly difficult to judge of dates by internal evidence—so little did his thought and style change from the beginning to the end of his work, from Thanatopsis to The Flood of Years—yet I feel almost safe in assigning our poem to the year 1825; the more so since it is a poem of Autumn, and since the comet of Encke, which he speaks of in the poem and names in his note, was visible in September and October of that year.

In any case, Musings is thoroughly characteristic of Bryant. No one but he, in the early part of the nineteenth century in America, could have written the beautiful lines—