The New York herald., 1922-12-03
By ALGERNON TASSIN and ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE

agreed with him had the right of the mat
ter.
His temperament was Puritan in another
important characteristic. He began to
think of the grave before he got out OF
the cradle And though his intense love
and close observation of nature was in it.
self quite unlike the Puritans, it had a
Puritan slant Out of everything he saw
there-fowers, woods, rivers, clouds. birds
he drew a moral lesson 1t was not so
much these things in themselves he wrote
about-although his poetry showed that
he looked at them very carefuIly-as their
to him about his own nature rather than
about theirs was what made them worth
writing up. During his entire life, with
only a few exceptions, he seems to have
felt in the old Puritan manner that the
only justification for writing poetry about
natural objects was to use them as pegs
to hang moral reflections upon. Sometimes
they were cheering lessons, as we'll as SOL
emn ones, but always they were lessons.
The ideas of running a government,
which he gave to the world before he was
16. did not, as you may imagine, prove
important. Also, you may imagine that
the philosophy of life he put at the age OF
IL into poem called 'Thanatopsis," which
means a view of death, was equally unim-
portant. But there you would be greatly
mistaken. No one has ever yet been able
to explain the mystery of genius And
though perhaps nothing was more likely
to be unimportant than a view of death
held by a boy of IL. this poem happened
to be about as satisfying and as perfect
a thing of it's kind as ever was written
Any language in any age of the worlds
history might be proud of it. No greatest
poet of any country at the end of his life
but would be glad to claim as his own the
work of this boy at the beginning of his
Its quality is what we call Greek. Per-
haps we can make this plain by COM
parison with Greek architecture Did you
ever see a Greek portico with its evenly
spaced stately columns holding up it's solid
dignified roof? 1t is simple, formal cool
serene. No matter how blazing the sun is
there are always quiet bands of shadow
in 1T. No matter now dark the day. il
seems to get more light than anything
else. Even when you are right in front
of it, there is something in it's nature
which makes it seem far away; and even
when you stand within it you never seem
to be really part of it. That is why. even
when such portico is the entrance to a
home or place of business, there is moth
ing of the everyday world about it, II
seems more permanent than the rest and
as if it ought to belong to a temple How
should a farmers boy in little village ir
western Massachusetts get this quality Of
a Greek portico into his poem? There had
been nothing like it, for all their talk Of
Athens. in the entire nation before.
That is what the editors of a magazine
| in Boston thought. Some years after the
boy had written it, his father came across
IL, and with tears streaming down his face
sent it to town to see if the editors would
admire it as much as he did. 1t was with
almost the same stirring of heart that
they read it, and then stared at each other
unbelievingly. Finally one of them said
You have been deceived-no one on thi.
side of the Atlantic is capable of writing
such verse" When they printed it and
another poem. "The Waterfowl" every
body with literary perception i'm Americs
said the same thing: Here are the great
est poems this country has ever produced.
Not having the money to go on with
his college course Bryant had entered
| lawyers office to study law. Since nov
he had made suddenly this great reputation
through Boston magazine. naturally YOU
would think he would have tried to com
bine law with literature in Boston. How