Chapter VIII: Part I (4)

Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the advance of glaciers, and very justly, since they are in constant onward motion, being kept within their limits only by a waste at their lower extremity proportionate to their advance. But in considering the past history of glaciers, we must think of their changes as retrograde, not progressive movements; since, if the glacial theory be true, a great mass of ice, of which the present glaciers are but the remnants, formerly spread over the whole Northern hemisphere, and has gradually disappeared, until now no traces of it are to be found, except in the Arctic regions and in lofty mountain-ranges. Every terminal moraine, such as I described in the last article, is the retreating footprint of some glacier, as it slowly yielded its possession of the plain, and betook itself to the mountains; wherever we find one of these ancient semicircular walls of unusual size, there we may be sure the glacier resolutely set its icy foot, disputing the ground inch by inch, while heat and cold strove for the mastery. There may have been a succession of cold summers, or, if now and then a warmer summer intervened, a colder one followed, so that the glacier regained the next year the ground it had lost during the preceding one, thus continuing to oscillate for a number of years along the same line, and adding constantly to the _débris_ collected at its extremity. Wherever such oscillations and pauses in the retreat of the glacier occurred, all the materials annually brought down to its terminus were collected; and when it finally disappeared from that point, it left a wall to mark its temporary resting-place.

By these semicircular concentric walls we can trace the retreat of the ice as it withdrew from the plain of Switzerland to the fastnesses of the Alps. It paused at Berne, and laid the foundation of the present city, which is built on an ancient moraine; it made a stand again at the Lake of Thun, and barred its northern outlet by a wall which holds its waters back to this day. Other moraines, though less distinct, are visible nearer the base of the Bernese Alps, and, above Meyringen, the valley is spanned by one of very large dimensions. Again, on the other side of the first chain of high peaks, the glacier of the Rhone, descending the valley toward the Lake of Geneva, has everywhere left traces of its ancient extension. We find the valley crossed at various distances by concentric moraines, until we reach the lake. There are no less than thirteen concentric moraines immediately below the present termination of the glacier of the Rhone, the one nearest to the ice, and the last formed, marking its present boundary. Others are visible half a mile, a mile, and two or three miles beyond, near the villages of Obergestelen and Münster. One of the largest and finest of these ancient moraines of the glacier of the Rhone stands at Viesch, and extends across the whole valley, while the Rhone, already swollen by many mountain-torrents, has cut its way through it. Lower down, we meet with traces of other ancient glaciers, reaching laterally the main glacier, which occupied the centre of the valley: such was the glacier of Viesch, when it extended as far down as the village;[49] such was the glacier of Aletsch, when it added its burden of ice to that coming from the upper valley; such was the glacier of the Simplon, whose moraines, of less antiquity, may now be seen by the road-side leading over the Alps to Italy; such were the two gigantic twin glaciers that drained the northern slopes of the mountain-colosses around Monte Rosa and Matterhorn, united at Stalden, and thence, losing their independence, became simply lateral tributaries of the great glacier of the Rhone; such were, farther on, the glaciers coming down from all the side-valleys opening into the Rhone basin; such were the glaciers of the St. Bernard, and even those of Chamouni, which in those early days crossed the Tête Noire to unite below Martigny with those that filled the valley of the Rhone. Thus the outlines of this glacier may be followed from its present remnant at the summit of the Valais, where the Rhone now springs forth from the ice, to the very shores of the Lake of Geneva, where, near the mouth of the river, on both banks of the valley, the ancient moraines may be traced to this day, thousands of feet above the level of the water, marking the course the glacier once followed.

It is evident that here the remains of the glacier mark a process of retrogression; for had these successive walls of loose materials been deposited in consequence of the advance of the glacier, they would have been pushed together in one heap at its lower end. That such would have been the case is not mere inference, but has been determined by direct observation in other localities. We know, for instance, by historical record, (see Gruner's "Natural History of the Glaciers of Switzerland,") that in the seventeenth century a number of successive moraines existed at Grindelwald, which have since been driven together by the advance of the glacier, and now form but one. Indeed, we have ample traditional evidence of the oscillations of glacier-boundaries in recent times. When I was engaged in the investigation of this subject, I sought out all the chronicles kept in old convents or libraries which might throw any light upon it. Among other records, I chanced upon the following, which may have some interest for the historian as well as the geologist.

During the religious wars of the sixteenth century, when the Catholics gained the ascendancy in the Canton of Valais, the inhabitants of the upper valleys adhered to the Protestant faith. Shut out from ordinary communication with the Protestant churches by the Bernese Oberland, the account states that these peasants braved every obstacle to the exercise of their religion, and used to carry their children over a certain road by the valley of Viesch, across the Alps, to be baptized at Grindelwald, on the farther side of the glaciers of Aletsch and Viesch. I could not understand this statement, for no such road exists, or could be conceived possible at present; nor was there any knowledge of it among the guides, intimate as they are with every feature of the region. Impressed, however, with the idea that there must be some foundation for the statement, I carefully examined the ground, and, penetrating under the glacier of Aletsch, I actually found, a number of feet below the present level of the ice, the paved road along which these hardy people travelled to church with their children, and some traces of which are still visible. It has been almost completely buried, although here and there it reappears; but at this day it is completely impassable for ordinary travel.

Evidence of a like character is found in a number of facts cited by Venetz in his celebrated paper upon the variations of temperature in the Swiss Alps, drawn from the parish and commune registers of the Canton of Valais. Among these are acts concerning the right to roads which are now either entirely hidden by ice, or rendered nearly useless by the advance of the glacier, a lawsuit respecting the use of a forest which no longer exists, but the site of which is covered by a glacier, and other records of a similar character. The only document, so far as I know, previous to this century, which furnishes the means of delineating with any accuracy the former boundary of a glacier, is a topographical plan of the environs of the Grimsel, including the extremity of the Aar, making a part of Altmann's work upon the Alps.

In 1740, Kapeler, a physician of Lucerne, undertook a journey to the mountains of the Aar, to visit certain crystal grottos, now well known, but then recently discovered. He prepared a map of these grottos and their vicinity, in which they are represented as being situated at some distance from the extremity of the glacier, the lower end of which is now considerably beyond them.[50]

But to return to the glacier of the Rhone. We can detect the sequence and relative age of its ancient moraines, not only by their position with reference to each other and to the present glacier, but also by their vegetation. The older ones have a mature vegetation; indeed, some of the largest trees of the valley stand upon the lower moraines, while those higher up, nearer the glacier, have only comparatively small trees, and the more recent ones are almost bare of vegetation. Moreover, we do not lose the track of the great glacier of the Rhone even when we have followed its ancient boundaries to the shores of the Lake of Geneva; for along its northern and southern shores we can follow the lateral moraines marking the limits of the glacier which once occupied that crescent-shaped depression now filled by the blue waters of the lake.

M. de Charpentier was the first geologist who attempted to draw the outlines of the glacier of the Rhone during its greatest extension, when it not only filled the basin of the Lake of Geneva, but stretched across the hilly plain to the north, reached the foot of the Jura, and even rose to a considerable height along the southern slope of that chain of mountains. At that time the colossal glacier spread at its extremity like a fan, extending westward in the direction of Geneva and eastward towards Soleure.[51] The very minute and extensive investigations of Professor A. Guyot upon the erratic boulders of Switzerland have not only confirmed the statements of M. de Charpentier, but even shown that the northeastern boundary of the ancient glacier of the Rhone was more extensive than was at first supposed. Other researches upon the ancient moraines along the shores of the Lake of Geneva, and in other parts of Switzerland, in which most geologists of the day took an active part, have made us as fully conversant with the successive outlines and varying extent of the principal glaciers ranging from the Alpine summits to the surrounding lowlands as we are with the glaciers in their present circumscription. But no one has done as much as Professor Guyot to add precision to these investigations. The number of localities, the level of which he has determined barometrically, with the view of fixing the ancient levels of all these vanished glaciers, is almost incredible. The result of all these surveys has been a distinct recognition of not less than seven gigantic glaciers descending from the northern and western slopes of the Alps to the adjoining hilly plains of Switzerland and France. It is most interesting to trace their outlines upon a recent map of those countries, but it requires that kind of intellectual effort of the imagination without which the most brilliant results of modern science remain an unmeaning record to us. Let us, nevertheless, try to follow.

The glacier of the Rhone, occupying the whole space between the Bernese and Valesian Alps, filled to overflowing the valley of the Rhone; at Martigny it was met by a large tributary from Mont Blanc, by the side of which it advanced into the plain beyond, filling the whole Lake of Geneva, and covering the beautiful Canton de Vaud and parts of Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Berne, and Soleure, rising to the crest of the Jura, and in many points penetrating even beyond its outer range.

To the east of this, the largest of all the ancient glaciers of Switzerland, we find the ancient glacier of the Aar, descending from the northern slope of the whole range of the Bernese Oberland. The glaciers that once filled the valley of Hasli, from the Grimsel to Meyringen, and those that came down from the Wetterhörner, the Schreckhörner, the Finster-Aarhorn, and the Jungfrau, through the valleys of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, united in a common bed, the bottom of which was the present basin of the Lakes of Brientz and Thun. These were joined by the glaciers emptying their burden through the valley of the Kander. To these combined glaciers the formation of the terminal moraine of Thun must be ascribed. But before this had been formed, the glacier of the Aar, in its amplest extension, had also reached the foot of the Jura, without, however, spreading so widely as the glacier of the Rhone. Farther to the east Professor Guyot has traced the boundaries of three other colossal glaciers, one of which derived its chief supplies from the Alps of Uri, bringing with it all the tributaries which the main glacier coming down from the St. Gothard received right and left, in its course through the valley of the Reuss and the basins of the Lakes of Lucerne and Zug. The second, born in the Canton of Glaris, followed mainly the present course of the Linth and the basin of the Lake of Zurich. Professor Escher von der Linth has shown that the lovely city of Zurich is built upon a moraine, like Berne. The imagination shrinks from the thought that all the beautiful scenery of those countries should once have been hidden under masses of ice, like those now covering Greenland. The easternmost ancient glacier of Switzerland is that of the Rhine, arising from all the valleys from which now descend the many tributaries of that stream, spreading over the northeastern Cantons, filling the Lake of Constance, and terminating at the foot of the Suabian Alp. Next to the glacier of the Rhone, this was once the largest of those descending from the range of the Alps.

West of Mont Blanc Professor Guyot has traced the boundaries of two other distinct ancient glaciers; one of which, the glacier of the Arve, followed chiefly the course of the Arve, and, though discharging the icy accumulations from the western slope of Mont Blanc, was, as it were, only a lateral affluent of the great glacier of the Rhone. The other, the glacier of the Isère, occupied, to the south and west of the preceding, the large triangular space intervening between the Alps and the Jura, in that part of Savoy where the two mountain-chains converge and become united.

It would lead me too far, were I to describe also the course of the great ancient glaciers which descended from the southern slopes of the Alps into the plain of Northern Italy. Moreover, these boundaries are not yet ascertained with the same degree of accuracy as those of the northern and western slopes; though very accurate descriptions of some of them have been published, with illustrations on a large scale, by MM. Martins and Gastaldi, and of others by Professor Ramsey. I have myself examined only the upper part of that of the valley of Aosta.

The evidence concerning the ancient glaciers of the Alps, especially within the limits of Switzerland, is already so full that it affords ample means for a comprehensive general view of the subject. It is frequently the case, that, when a stretch of time or space lies between us and a matter we have once studied more closely, it presents itself to us as a whole more vividly than when our nearness to it forced all its details upon our observation. In my present position, now that the lapse of many years separates me from my personal investigations of the ancient and modern glaciers, and I look back upon them from another continent, it seems to me that I have, as it were, a bird's-eye view of their whole extent; and I confess that this distant retrospect of the subject has been to me almost as fascinating as were the researches of my earlier years in the same direction. I wish that I could present it to the minds of my readers with something of the attraction it possesses for me. I trust, however, that I have made it plain to them that the great mountain-chain of the Alps has been a central axis from which immense glaciers at one time descended in every direction, not only to its base, beyond which the lowlands extend in flat undulations, but to a greater or less distance over the adjoining plains; while at present they are confined to the higher valleys. So far, then, notwithstanding the extraordinary difference in their dimensions, at the time they reached the Jura and the plain of Northern Italy, when compared with what they are now, they seem directly connected with the Alps, and the mountains appear as their birthplace; so much so that the first attempts at a generalization concerning their origin started from the assumption that they must have been formed between the high ridges from which they seem to flow down. These facts, then the only ones known concerning a greater extension of the glaciers, naturally led to the views advocated by M. de Charpentier. My own theory was also at first, that the upheaval of the Alps must, in some way or other, have been connected with these phenomena. But it soon became evident to me that these views were inadequate to account for the former presence of extensive glaciers in other parts of Europe; and even within the range of the Alps there were insuperable objections to their final admission. If the ancient glaciers had been first formed among the highest mountains, and extended downwards into the plains, the largest and highest moraines ought to be the most distant, and to be formed of the most rounded masses; whereas the actual condition of the detrital accumulations is the reverse, the distant materials being widely spread, and true moraines being found only in valleys connected with great chains of lofty mountains.

Again, all these moraines are within one another,--the most distant from the glacier to which they owe their origin encircling all those which are nearer and nearer to it within the same glacial basin. And as no glacier could reach to its farthest moraine without pushing forward all the intervening loose materials, it is self-evident that the outer moraines were first formed, and those nearer the glacier subsequently, in the order in which they follow one another from the lower valleys to the higher levels at which alone glaciers exist at present. Translating these facts into words, we see that the glaciers to which these ancient moraines owe their origin must have been retreating gradually while the moraines were accumulating. But a glacier while uniformly retreating forms no high walls of loose materials around its edges and at its lower extremity; as it melts away, it only drops the burden of angular rocky fragments which it carries upon its back over the loose fragments above which it moves, and which it grinds to powder, or to sand, or to rounded pebbles, in its progress. It is only where the glacier remains stationary for a longer or shorter period that large terminal moraines can accumulate; and they are generally found in such places in the valleys of the Alps as would naturally determine the lower limit of a glacier for the time being. There is no possibility of escaping the conclusion that the ancient glaciers must have begun that series of oscillations to which the accumulation of the moraines is to be ascribed, at a time when ice-fields already occupied the whole area which they have covered during their greatest extension. After we shall have seen how many centres of dispersion of erratic boulders existed in the northern hemisphere, similar to that of the Alps, we may perhaps be able to form some idea of the manner in which these ice-fields originated and gradually vanished.

Some investigators have been inclined to explain the presence of boulders, moraines, drift, and the like phenomena, by the action of water. But even if we could believe that rivers had brought along with them such masses of rock, and deposited them where they are now found, the regularity in the distribution of the materials disproves any such theory. In the lateral moraines of the Lake of Geneva we have a striking illustration of this apparently systematic division of the loose materials; for the northeastern moraines of that glacial basin contain rocks belonging exclusively to the northern side of the valley of the Rhone, while the moraines on the southern shore of the lake consist of rocks belonging to its southern side. Indeed, rivers, so far from building up moraines, have often partially destroyed them. We find various instances of moraines through which a river runs, having worn for itself a passage, on either side of which the form of the moraine remains unbroken. In the valley of the Rhone there are villages built on such moraines, as, for instance, Viesch, with the river running through their centre.

But if we need further confirmation of the fact that these accumulations on either side of this and other Swiss lakes are ancient lateral moraines, we have it in their connection with walls of a like nature at their lower end, where we find again transverse moraines barring their outlet, and also in the continuity of long trains of fragments of similar rocks extending side by side across wide plains for great distances without mixture. From the beginning of my investigations upon the glaciers, I have urged these two points as most directly proving their greater extension in former times, and more recent researches constantly recur to this kind of evidence. All our lakes would be filled with loose materials, had their basins not been sheltered by ice against the encroachments of river-deposits during the transportation of the erratic boulders to the farthest limits of their respective areas; and all the continuous trails of rocks derived from the same locality would have been scattered over wide areas, had they not been carried along, in unyielding tracks, like moraines. On a small scale the waters of the Rhone and of the Arve recall to this day such a picture. There are few travellers in Switzerland who have not seen these two rivers, where they flow side by side, meeting, but not mingling, at the southern extremity of the lake, the different color of their water marking the two parallel currents. In old times, when the glaciers filled all the valleys at the base of Mont Blanc, and to the east of it, uniting in the valley through which now runs the River Rhone, the glacier of the Arve came down to meet the ice from the valley of the Rhone, in the same manner as the River Arve now comes to meet the waters of the Rhone where they rush out from the southern end of the lake.

This would be the proper place to consider the formation of the lakes of Switzerland, as well as their preservation by the agency of glaciers. But this subject is so intricate, and has already given rise to so many controversies which could not be overlooked in this connection, that I prefer to pass it over altogether in silence. Suffice it to say that not only are most of the lakes of Switzerland hemmed in by transverse moraines at their lower extremity, but the lakes of Upper Italy, at the foot of the Alps, are barred in the same way, as are also the lakes of Norway and Sweden, and some of our own ponds and lakes. Strange as it may seem to the traveller who sails under an Italian sky over the lovely waters of Como, Maggiore, and Lugano, it is, nevertheless, true, that these depressions were once filled by solid masses of ice, and that the walls built by the old glaciers still block their southern outlets. Indeed, were it not for these moraines, there would be comparatively few lakes either in Northern Italy or in Switzerland. The greater part of them have such a wall built across one end; and but for this masonry of the glacier, there would have been nothing to prevent their waters from flowing out into the plain at the breaking up of the ice-period. We should then have had open valleys in place of all these sheets of water which give such diversity and beauty to the scenery of Northern Italy and Switzerland, or, at least, the lakes would be much fewer and occupy only the deeper depressions in the hard rocks.

Such being the evidences of the former extent of the glaciers in the plains, what do the mountain-summits tell us of their height and depth? for here, also, they have left their handwriting on the wall. Every mountain-side in the Alps is inscribed with these ancient characters, recording the level of the ice in past times. Here and there a ledge or terrace on the wall of the valley has afforded support for the lateral moraines, and wherever such an accumulation is left, it marks the limit of the ice at some former period. These indications are, however, uncertain and fragmentary, depending upon projections of the rocky walls. But thousands of feet above the present level of the glacier, far up toward their summits, we find the sides of the mountains furrowed, scratched, and polished in exactly the same manner as the surfaces over which the glaciers pass at present. These marks are as legible and clear to one who is familiar with glacial traces as are hieroglyphics to the Egyptian scholar; indeed, more so,--for he not only recognizes their presence, but reads their meaning at a glance. Above the line at which these indications cease, the edges of the rocks are sharp and angular, the surface of the mountain rough, unpolished, and absolutely devoid of all those marks resulting from glacial action. On the Alps these traces are visible to a height of nine thousand feet, and across the whole plain of Switzerland, as I have stated, one may trace the glaciers by their moraines, by the masses of rock they have let fall here and there, by the drift they have deposited, to the very foot of the opposite chain, where they have dropped their boulders along the base of the Jura. Ascending that chain, one finds the grooved, polished, and scratched surfaces to its summit, on the very crest of which boulders entirely foreign to the locality are perched. Follow the range down upon the other side and you find the same indications extending into the plains of Burgundy and France beyond.

With a chain of evidence so complete, it seems to me impossible to deny that the whole space between the opposite chains of the Alps and the Jura was once filled with ice; that this mass of ice completely covered the Jura, with the exception of a few high crests, perhaps, rising island-like above it, and mounted to a height of some nine thousand feet upon the Alps, while it extended on the one side into the northern plain of Italy, filling all its depressions, and on the other down to the plains of Central Europe. The only natural inference from these facts is, that the climatic conditions leading to their existence could not have been local; they must have been cosmic. When Switzerland was bridged across from range to range by a mass of ice stretching southward into Lombardy and Tuscany, northward into France and Burgundy, the rest of Europe could not have remained unaffected by the causes which induced this state of things.

It was this conviction which led me to seek for the traces of glaciers in Great Britain. I had never been in the regions I intended to visit, but I knew the forms of the valleys in the lake-country of England, in the Highlands of Scotland, and in the mountains of Wales and Ireland, and I was as confident that I should find them crossed by terminal moraines and bordered by lateral ones, as if I had already seen them.

The reader must not suppose, when I describe these walls, formed of the _débris_ of the glacier, as consisting of boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, and gravel, a rough accumulation of loose materials indiscriminately thrown together, that we find the ancient moraines presenting any such appearance. Time, which mellows and softens all the wrecks of the past, has clothed them with turf, grassed them over, planted them with trees, sown his seed and gathered in his harvests upon them, until at last they make a part of the undulating surface of the country. Were it not for anticipating my story, I could point out many a green billow, rising out of the fields and meadows immediately about us, that had its origin in the old ice-time. Thus disguised, they are not so evident to the casual observer; but, nevertheless, when once familiar with the peculiar form, character, and position of these rounded ridges scattered over the face of the country, they are easily recognized.

Of course, the ancient glaciers of Great Britain were far more difficult to trace than those of Switzerland, where the present glaciers are guides to the old ones. But, nevertheless, my expectations were more than answered. The first valley I entered in the glacial regions of Scotland was barred by a terminal moraine; and throughout the North of England, as well as in Scotland and Ireland, I found the hill-sides covered with traces of glacial action, as distinct and unmistakable as those I had left in my native land. And not only was the surface of the country polished, grooved, and scratched, as in the region of existing glaciers, and presenting an appearance corresponding exactly to that described elsewhere, but we could track the path of the boulders where they had come down from the hills above and been carried from the mouth of each valley far down into the plains below. In Scotland and Ireland the phenomena were especially interesting. I had intended to give in this article some account of the "parallel roads" of Glenroy, marking the ancient levels of glacier-lakes, so much discussed in this connection. But the reminiscences of old friends, and the many associations revived in my mind by recurring to a subject which I have long looked upon as a closed chapter, so far as my own researches are concerned, have constantly led me beyond the limits I had prescribed to myself in these papers upon glaciers; and as the story of Glenroy and the phenomena connected with it is a long one, I shall reserve it for a subsequent number.

* * * * *

BRYANT.

The literary life of Bryant begins with the publication of "Thanatopsis" in the "North American Review," in 1816; for we need take no account of those earlier blossoms, plucked untimely from the tree, as they had been prematurely expanded by the heat of party politics. The strain of that song was of a higher mood. In those days, when American literature spoke with faint and feeble voice, like the chirp of half-awakened birds in the morning twilight, we need not say what cordial welcome was extended to a poem which embodied in blank verse worthy of anybody since Milton thoughts of the highest reach and noblest power, or what wonder was mingled with the praise when it was announced that this grand and majestic moral teaching and this rich and sustained music were the work of a boy of eighteen. Not that Bryant was no more than eighteen when "Thanatopsis" was printed, for he must pay one of the tributes of eminence in having all the world know that he was born in 1794; but he was no more than eighteen when it was written, and surely never was there riper fruit plucked from so young a tree. And now we have before us, with the imprint of 1864, his latest volume, entitled "Thirty Poems." Between this date and that of the publication of "Thanatopsis" there sweeps an arch of forty-eight years. With Bryant these have been years of manly toil, of resolute sacrifice, of faithful discharge of all the duties of life. The cultivation of the poetical faculty is not always favorable to the growth of the character, but Bryant is no less estimable as a man than admirable as a poet. It has been his lot to earn his bread by the exercise of the prose part of his mind,--by those qualities which he has in common with other men,--and his poetry has been written in the intervals and breathing-spaces of a life of regular industry. This necessity for ungenial toil may have added something to the shyness and gravity of the poet's manners; but it has doubtless given earnestness, concentration, depth, and a strong flavor of life to his verse. Had he been a man of leisure, he might have written more, but he could hardly have written better. And nothing tends more to prolong to old age the freshness of feeling and the sensibility to impressions which are characteristic of the poetical temperament than the dedication of a portion of every day to some kind of task-work. The sweetest flowers are those which grow upon the rocks of renunciation. Byron at thirty-seven was a burnt-out volcano: Bryant at threescore and ten is as sensitive to the touch of beauty as at twenty.

The poetry of Bryant is not great in amount, but it represents a great deal of work, as few men are more finished artists than he, or more patient in shaping and polishing their productions. No piece of verse ever leaves his hands till it has received the last touch demanded by the most correct judgment and the most fastidious taste. Thus the style of his poetry is always admirable. Nowhere can one find in what he has written a careless or slovenly expression, an awkward phrase, or an ill-chosen word. He never puts in an epithet to fill out a line, and never uses one which could be improved by substituting another. The range within which he moves is not wide. He has not written narrative or dramatic poems: he has not painted poetical portraits: he has not aspired to the honors of satire, of wit, or of humor: he has made no contributions to the poetry of passion. His poems may be divided into two great classes,--those which express the moral aspects of humanity, and those which interpret the language of Nature; though it may be added that in not a few of his productions these two elements are combined. Those of the former class are not so remarkable for originality of treatment as for the beauty and truth with which they express the reflections of the general mind and the emotions of the general heart. In these poems we see our own experience returned to us, touched with the lights and colored with the hues of the most exquisite poetry. Their tone is grave and high, but not gloomy or morbid: the edges of the cloud of life are turned to gold by faith and hope. Of the poems of this class, "Thanatopsis," of which we have already spoken, is one of the best known. Others are the "Hymn to Death," "The Old Man's Funeral," "A Forest Hymn," "The Lapse of Time," "An Evening Reverie," "The Old Man's Counsel," and "The Past." This last is one of the noblest of his productions, full of solemn beauty and melancholy music, and we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting a few of its stanzas.

"Thou unrelenting Past!
Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,
And fetters, sure and fast,
Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

"Far in thy realm withdrawn,
Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom,
And glorious ages gone
Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.

"Childhood, with all its mirth,
Youth, Manhood, Age, that draws us to the ground,
And last, Man's Life on earth,
Glide to thy dim dominions, and are bound.

* * * * *

"In thy abysses hide
Beauty and excellence unknown,--to thee
Earth's wonder and her pride
Are gathered, as the waters to the sea;

"Labors of good to man,
Unpublished charity, unbroken faith,--
Love, that 'midst grief began,
And grew with years, and faltered not in death.

"Full many a mighty name
Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevered;
With thee are silent fame.
Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappeared.

"Thine for a space are they,--
Yet shalt thou yield thy treasures up at last;
Thy gates shall yet give way,
Thy bolts shall fall, inexorable Past!

"All that of good and fair
Has gone into thy womb from earliest time
Shall then come forth to wear
The glory and the beauty of its prime."

Here is nothing new. It is the old, sad strain, of coeval birth with poetry itself. It may be read in the Hebrew of the Book of Job and in the Greek of Homer: but with what dignity of sentiment, what majestic music, what beauty of language, the oft-repeated lesson of humanity is enforced! Every word is chosen with unerring judgment, and no needless dilution of language weakens the force of the conceptions and pictures. Bryant is one of the few poets who will bear the test of the well-nigh obsolete art of verbal criticism: observe the expressions, "_silent_ fame," "_forgotten_ arts," "wisdom _disappeared_": how exactly these epithets satisfy the ear and the mind! how impossible to change any one of them for the better!

In Bryant's descriptive poems there is the same finished execution and the same beauty of style as in his reflective and didactic poems, with more originality of treatment. It was his fortune to be born and reared in the western part of Massachusetts, and to become familiar with some of the most beautiful inland scenery of New England in youth and early manhood, when the mind takes impressions which the attrition of life never wears out. In his study of Nature he combines the faculty and the vision, the eye of the naturalist and the imagination of the poet. No man observes the outward shows of earth and sky more accurately; no man feels them more vividly; no man describes them more beautifully. He was the first of our poets who, deserting the conventional paths in which imitators move, studied and delineated Nature as it exists in New England, modified by the elements of a comparatively low latitude, a brilliant sky, uncertain springs, short and hot summers, richly colored autumns, and winters of pure and crystal cold. The merit and the popularity of Bryant's descriptive poetry prove how intimate is the relation between imagination and truth, and how the poet who is faithful to the highest requisitions of his art must obey laws as rigid as those of science itself. Here, at the risk of making our readers read again what they may have read before, we transcribe a passage from a memorandum of Mr. Morritt's, containing an account of Scott's proceedings while studying the localities of "Rokeby":--

"I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended Cave of Grey Denzil, and could not help saying, that, as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, 'that in Nature no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of Nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to his imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth.'"

This is excellent good sense, and the descriptive poetry of Bryant shows how carefully he has observed the rules which Scott has laid down. He never has a conventional image, and never resorts to the second-hand frippery of a poetical commonplace-book to tag his verses with. Every season of our American year has been delineated by him, and the drawing and coloring of his pictures are always correct. Our American springs, for instance, are not at all the ideal or poetical springs, and Bryant does not pretend that they are; and yet he can find a poetical side to them, as witness his poem entitled "March":--

"The stormy March is come at last,
With wind, and cloud, and changing skies:
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies.

"Ah, passing few are they who speak,
Wild, stormy month! in praise of thee;
Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak,
Thou art a welcome month to me.

"For thou to northern lands again
The glad and glorious sun dost bring;
And them hast joined the gentle train,
And wear'st the gentle name of Spring.

"And in thy reign of blast and storm
Smiles many a long, bright, sunny day,
When the changed winds are soft and warm,
And heaven puts on the blue of May."

This is all as strictly true as if it were drawn up for an affidavit. March, as we all know, is the eldest daughter of Winter, and bitterly like her grim sire. The snow which has melted from the uplands lingers in the valleys; the storms, and the cloudy skies, and the rushing blasts mark the sullen retreat of winter; but the days are growing longer, the sun mounts higher, and sometimes a soft and vernal air flows from the blue sky, like Burns's daisy "glinting forth" amid the storm.

March and April come and go, and May succeeds. Hers is not quite the "blue, voluptuous eye" she wears in the portraits which poets paint of her, and those who court her smiles are sometimes chilled by decidedly wintry glances. Bryant gives us her best aspect:--

"The sun of May was bright in middle heaven,
And steeped the sprouting forests, the green hills,
And emerald wheat-fields, in his yellow light.
Upon the apple-tree, where rosy buds
Stood clustered, ready to burst forth in bloom,
The robin warbled forth his full clear note
For hours, and wearied not. Within the woods,
Where young and half-transparent leaves scarce cast
A shade, gay circles of anemones
Danced on their stalks; the shad-bush, white with flowers,
Brightened the glens; the new-leaved butternut
And quivering poplar to the roving breeze
Gave a balsamic fragrance."

How admirable this is! And with what truth, we had almost said courage, the poet makes his report. The emerald wheat-fields, the rosy buds of the apple-tree, the half-transparent leaves of the trees, the anemones on their restless stalks, the shad-bush (_Amelanchier Botryapium_), the quivering poplars, and the peculiar balsamic odor which one perceives in the woods at that season are so exactly what we find in our New-England May! How much better these distinct statements are than a tissue of generalities about flowery wreaths, and fragrant zephyrs, and genial rays, and fresh verdure, and vernal airs, and ambrosial dews!

But the year goes on. Our fitful and capricious spring passes by, and summer takes its place. But our New-England summer is not like the summer of Thomson and Cowper, and images drawn from English poetry and transplanted here would be out of place; and our faithful interpreter of American Nature takes nothing at second-hand. How correctly he delineates the characteristic features of our glorious month of June!

"There, through the long, long summer hours,
The golden light should lie,
And thick young herbs and groups of flowers
Stand in their beauty by.
The oriole should build and tell
His love-tale close beside my cell;
The idle butterfly
Should rest him here, and there be heard
The housewife-bee and humming-bird."

The _housewife_-bee is an expressive epithet. Does it involve a double meaning, and insinuate that as a bee carries a sting, so women who are stirring, notable, and good housekeepers have something sharp in their natures?

Next comes midsummer with its fervid and overpowering heats, which find in our poet also an accurate delineator.

"It is a sultry day: the sun has drunk
The dew that lay upon the morning grass;
There is no rustling in the lofty elm
That canopies my dwelling, and its shade
Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint
And interrupted murmur of the bee,
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again
Instantly on the wing. The plants around
Feel the too potent fervors: the tall maize
Rolls up its long green leaves; the clover droops
Its tender foliage, and declines its blooms.
But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills
With all their growth of woods, silent and stern,
As if the scorching heat and dazzling light
Were but an element they loved."

But our radiant and many-colored autumn is Bryant's favorite season, and some of his most beautiful and characteristic passages are those which paint its hues of crimson and purple, and the vaporous gold of its atmosphere. Such is the number of these passages that it is difficult to make a selection of one or two for quotation. Here is one from "Autumn Woods."

"Let in through all the trees,
Come the strange rays; the forest-depths are bright;
Their sunny-colored foliage, in the breeze,
Twinkles like beams of light.

"The rivulet, late unseen,
Where bickering through the shrubs its waters run,
Shines with the image of its golden screen
And glimmerings of the sun.

"But, 'neath yon crimson tree,
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame."

Here is nothing imitative or borrowed, and here are no unmeaning generalities. Everything is exact and local,--drawn from an American autumn, and no other. And how lovely an image is that in the third stanza, and what an added charm it gives to an object in itself most beautiful!

But our renders must indulge us with one more quotation under this head, although we take it from one of the most popular--perhaps the most popular--of his poems, "The Death of the Flowers."

"The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.
And now, when comes the calm mid-day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home,
_When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill_,
The south-wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more."

Of the poetry of these exquisite lines, the melancholy sweetness of the sentiment, the delicate beauty of the versification, we need not say one word, but we claim a moment's attention to their fidelity to truth, and the accuracy of observation which they evince. The golden-rod and the aster are the characteristic autumn flowers in that zone of our continent in which New England is embraced, and the sunflower is a very common flower at that season. That lovely child of the declining year, the fringed gentian, would doubtless have been brought in with her fair sisters, had it not been for her somewhat unmanageable name. Bryant has written some beautiful stanzas to this flower, but in them he only calls it a "blossom." And how fine a landscape is condensed into the two delicious hues which we have Italicized! and yet no one ever walked into a New-England wood on a late day in autumn without hearing the nuts drop upon the withered leaves, and seeing the streams flash through the smoke-like haze which hangs over the landscape.

But winter, especially our clear and sparkling New-England winter, has its scenes of splendor and aspects of beauty; and the poet would not be true to his calling, if he failed to recognize them.

"Come when the rains
Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice,
While the slant sun of February pours
Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach!
The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps,
And the broad arching portals of the grove
Welcome thy entering. Look! the massy
Trunks are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray,
Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven,
Is studded with its trembling water-drops
That glimmer with an amethystine light;
But round the parent stem the long, low boughs
Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide
The glassy floor."

There are many more lines equally good, but we have not space for them. This is a description of winter as we have it here, compounded of the elements of extreme cold, a transparent atmosphere, and brilliant sunshine. No English poet can see such a scene, at least in his own country: Ambrose Phillips did see something like it in Sweden, and described it in a poetical epistle to the Earl of Dorset, which is much the best thing he ever wrote, and has a pulse of truth and life in it, from the simple fact that he saw something new, and told his noble correspondent what he saw.

But Bryant's claims to the honors of a truly national poet do not rest solely upon the fidelity with which he has described the peculiar scenery of his native land, for no poet has expressed with more earnestness of conviction and more beauty of language the great ideas which have moulded our political institutions and our social life. Before the breaking out of the Civil War he was a member of that great political party of which Jefferson was the head, and he is still a Democrat in the primitive sense of the word; that is to say, he believes in man's capacity for self-government, and in his right to govern himself. He has full trust in human progress; age has not lessened the faith with which he looks forward to the future; his sympathies are with the many, and not with the few. Though he has travelled much in Europe, his imagination has been but little affected by the forms of beauty and grandeur which past ages have bequeathed to the present. He has not found inspiration in the palace, the cathedral, the ruined castle, the ivy-covered church, the rose-embowered cottage. Indeed, it is only by incidental and occasional touches that one would learn from his poetry that he had ever been out of his own country at all: his inspiration and his themes are alike drawn from the scenery, the institutions, the history of his native land. His imagination, as was the case with Milton, rests upon a basis of gravity deepening into sternness; and we have little doubt that not a few of the things in Europe, which move to pleasure the lightly stirred fancy of many American travellers, aroused in him a different feeling, as either memorials of an age or expressions of a system in which the many were sacrificed to the few. In his mental frame there is a pulse of indignation which is easily stirred against any form of injustice or oppression. His later poems, as might naturally be expected, are those in which the sentiments and aspirations of a patriotic and hopeful American are most distinctly expressed; among them are "The Battle-Field," "The Winds," "The Antiquity of Freedom," and that which is called, from its first line, "O Mother of a Mighty Race." It would be well to read these poems in connection with the seventeenth chapter of the second volume of De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," which treats of the sources of poetry among democratic nations; and the comparison will furnish fresh cause for admiring the prophetic sagacity of that great philosophical thinker, who, at the time he wrote, predicted all our future, because he comprehended all our past.

And here we pray the indulgence of our readers to a rather liberal citation from one of these later poems, because it enables us to illustrate from his own lips what we have just been saying. It is also one of those passages, not uncommon in modern poetry, in which the poet admits us to his confidence, and lets us see the working of the machinery as well as its product. It is from "The Painted Cup," a poem so called from a scarlet flower of that name found upon the Western prairies,

"Now, if thou art a poet, tell me not
That these bright chalices were tinted thus
To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet
On moonlight evenings in the hazel-bowers,
And dance till they are thirsty. Call not up,
Amid this fresh and virgin solitude,
The faded fancies of an elder world;
But leave these scarlet cups to spotted moths
Of June, and glistening flies, and hummingbirds,
To drink from, when on all these boundless lawns
The morning sun looks hot. Or let the wind
O'erturn in sport their ruddy brims, and pour
A sudden shower upon the strawberry-plant,
To swell the reddening fruit that even now
Breathes a slight fragrance from the sunny slope.