And it is not merely innocence, that may be ignorant of temptation. It is virtue, that has been exercised and crowned. He is sufficiently subjective to make us feel that his own nature, and the whole of it, is on the side of Right and Duty. He utters words

That make a man feel strong in speaking truth.

Indeed we suspect that it is this severe purity which some have condemned for coldness. But Bryant is not cold. He does not, like Byron and Schiller, seek by unnatural stimulants to exhibit an unnatural hectic flush of passion. But we misread "The Death of the Flowers," the "Green River," "The Rivulet," "The Past," and many other of his pieces, if they are not suffused with a roseate glow which is far enough from frigidness. His passion is taken up into the intellect and the imagination and sublimated there, but not extinguished. It is extinguished, however, to those who have long received "familiar the fierce heat" of Byron. Mr. Bryant's prevailing tone is undoubtedly mild and contemplative. His is, pre-eminently, the "harvest of a quiet eye." He wins the most from nature when he finds her gentle and placid in her moods. And it is easy with him for the lid to grow heavy with tears while the eye looks out on man or nature. The minor key of sadness, which belongs to all our deepest emotions, and perhaps points to the great tragedy of the race, runs through Bryant's poetry. But he is not always either mild or sad. "The Song of the Stars," the "Song of Marion's Men," "The Hurricane," and some other pieces, are instinct with the authentic lyrical fire. There is not a finer specimen of its kind in the language than "The Hurricane." Bryant has been charged with monotony in treatment. There is ground for the charge, yet any one who will read in comparison,

"The Evening Wind," "The Summer Wind," and "The Hurricane," must confess that he was not monotonous for want of a very considerable range of power. "The Antiquity of Freedom" has a breadth, a vigor, and a loftiness in it almost Miltonic. Mr. Bryant left college, we believe, without completing his course, but he stayed long enough to snatch those nameless graces of culture which no length of stay could impart to anything but genius. His pages accordingly, have the garnish of occasional classicisms, not frequent, but always in exquisite taste. He also practises that incommunicable art-more than anything else perhaps a crucial test of genius-by which words, single words, are impregnated and polarized and made many-sided prisms of multiform suggestion. He has apparently never wrestled with great spiritual doubts and fears. At any rate his verse does not incline at all to "handle spiritual strife." For this reason he will not exercise an important office as teacher. This has been given to poets not a few, but Mr. Bryant is not of the number. He will, however, fulfil a mission as beautiful in furnishing language for the gentler emotions and the purer experiences of many a grateful heart. There will never come a time when the good will wish that his mission were ended.

10

MR. BRYANT'S ILIAD.

T is a felicity hardly to have been conjectured that

among American poets. We say crowned it, for whatever fruit of genius the fortunate old age of Mr. Bryant may hereafter produce, it would be less in the nature of a marvel than of a miracle, if it should produce anything worthy to take precedence in men's esteem of this noble translation of the Iliad of Homer, safe now in happy completion. We join our loyal suffrage to the well-nigh unanimous verdict which assuredly awaits from the universal republic of letters, to pronounce Mr. Bryant's work the nearest approach that has thus far been made to that final English Homer which has been looked for in vain so long. It would, no doubt, partake of the weakness of extravagance to say that Mr. Bryant has achieved an absolutely ideal success. We do not, however, deem ourselves extravagant in maintaining that he has given us a vernacular Iliad which is not only entitled to supersede for popular use all the other existing versions in English, but is moreover good enough to render every future attempt to do better superfluous and waste. The elusive shade of the Greek has disappointed many a sanguine proffer of ferriage across the river that separated him from citizenship and wont among the haunts of English speech. It would be rash thus early to

But

affirm that Mr. Bryant has fairly got him over. certainly no ferryman ever tempted him to cross with promise of the freedom of so luxurious an Elysium of English verse before.

There are several features of Mr. Bryant's achievement which conspire to make it a memorable incident in modern literary history. In the first place, it is noteworthy enough that a man of seventy, at no period of his life specially addicted to Greek learning, should conceive so arduous a project as the translation of the Iliad. And, by the way, it supplies an exceedingly gracious illustration of the amenities which seem so well to befit the fellowships of literature and of genius, that Mr. Bryant should have had the genial deference, in a serene old age removed from jealousy, to obey the generous behest which Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell, in their strenuous prime superior to envy, had the admirable discernment to lay upon him to undertake this work. Mr. Fields wrote to Mr. Bryant for a poetical contribution to "The Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Bryant's portfolio at the time was otherwise empty, but he sent a fragment of Homeric translation that happened to be there. The two poets, Longfellow and Lowell, found it so good, that they immediately joined in insisting that Mr. Bryant should become the translator of Homer. In the second place, the celerity with which Mr. Bryant dispatched his task deserves commemorative note. The life-long literary habit and facility of Pope, and his easy conscience concerning the duty of a translator, did not enable him, in the flush of his fame and in the full maturity of his powers, to translate the Iliad in less than five years—the time which Mr. Bryant has occupied in doing it, urged by a very different sense of obligation to his original, and in the late evening of a life exhausted upon pursuits that

must have gone far towards dissipating a natural aptitude for quick handiwork in letters, never, we suspect, too great. It almost pathetically attests the "sad mechanic" industry with which he sought nepenthe in his toil for that "great domestic sorrow" alluded to, with nobly characteristic reserve, in his preface. But the circumstance which makes his success most remarkable of all is one less obvious than either of these to general notice. Homer belonged to an age and a race almost antipodally removed from Mr. Bryant's. This, to be sure, is a disqualification common to Mr. Bryant with every contemporary English translator of Homer. But Mr. Bryant, as an interpreter of Homer, had the individual disqualification of being intensely contrasted with him in the quality of his genius, and, so far as we can judge, in the quality of his personal character. Homer lived in a world full of Greek life, and light, and laughter, and song. Everything was outward to him. "Milk" was "white" and "blood" was "red," and neither the meanest nor the highest flower that blows ever gave him a thought that was too deep for a lucky compound adjective to express. He was not proud and self-conscious in the vocation of his genius. He was well content to be a minstrel. He did not aspire to be a poet. He had capacity for ambition. He was sometimes a poet. always, as it were, in his own despite. He was generally quite satisfied to be the accepted ballad-wright of petty princes-the minstrel-laureate of their savage tricks and brutal brawls. Brawn and muscle, trappings and steeds, spears and shields, tilts and tourneys, were the sufficient matter of his song. To set these forth in brave style, he made the sacred aspects of nature and the august solemnities of religion, such as religion was to him, menial and servile. He describes

it, but no But it was