At any rate, the taste for rigid iambics would naturally be acquired by Bryant at his church-going in childhood, and from the eighteenth century poets whom he read earliest. The beautiful variety of modulations which Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson have shown this verse--the historic metre of our race--to be susceptible of, lay beyond Bryant’s range. His verse is either simple, almost colloquial, or dignified, as befits his theme; even in ornament he is sober. As he never surpassed the grandeur of conception of “Thanatopsis,” so, I think, he did not afterward equal the splendid metrical sweep of certain passages in that wonderful poem.
And this fact points to another: Bryant is one of the few poets of genuine power whose poetic career shows no advance. The first arrow he drew from his quiver was the best, and with it he made his longest shot; many others he sent in the same direction, but they all fell behind the first. This accounts for the singleness and depth of the impression he has left; he stands for two or three elementals, and thereby keeps his force unscattered. He was not, indeed, wholly insensible to the romanticist stirrings of his time, as such effusions as “The Damsel of Peru,” “The Arctic Lover,” and “The Hunter’s Serenade,” bear witness. He wrote several pieces about Indians,--not the real red men, but those imaginary noble savages, possessors of all the primitive virtues, with whom our grandfathers peopled the American forests. He wrote strenuously in behalf of Greek emancipation and against slavery; but even here, though the subject lay very near his heart, he could not match the righteous vehemence of Whittier, or Lowell’s alternate volleys of sarcasm and rebuke. Like Antaeus, Bryant ceased to be powerful when he did not tread his native earth.
We have thus surveyed his poetical product and genius, for to these first of all is due the celebration of his centennial, and we conclude that his contemporaries were right and that we are right in holding his work precious. But while it is through his poetry that Bryant survives, let us not forget the worth of his personality. For sixty years he was the dean of American letters. By his example he swept away the old foolish idea that unwillingness to pay bills, addiction to the bottle and women, and a preference for frowsy hair and dirty linen are necessary attributes of genius, especially of poetic genius. He disdained the proverbial backbiting and envy of authors. As the editor of a newspaper which for half a century had no superior in the country, he exercised an influence which cannot be computed. We who live under the _régime_ of journalists who conceive it to be the mission of newspapers to deposit at every doorstep from eight to eighty pages of the moral and political garbage of the world every morning,--we may well magnify Bryant, whose long editorial career bore witness that being a journalist should not absolve a man from the common obligations of moral cleanliness, of veracity, of scandal-hating, of delicacy, of honor.