When “Thanatopsis” was submitted by the poet’s father to _The North American Review_ (in 1817), people would hardly believe that such an exalted strain had been conceived outside of England. “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” (written in 1815) are indeed in many ways Wordsworthian; the similarity is immediately noticeable. Yet the similarity is not complete. In the first place, they are founded, and very definitely founded, upon the natural scenery of Bryant’s own New England environment; and they sprang out of a unified individual experience to which his personal observation contributed as much as his reading. But, as has been remarked before, the note of Bryant is a less joyous note than that of his great English exemplar, not only because of a difference in the selection of subjects, but through a difference in the treatment of detail as well. It is not to be expected that in perfection of technique a boy of seventeen could equal a poet who at the age of thirty-two (when Wordsworth first became at all generally known in America) was virtually master of his craft. Moreover, “Thanatopsis” as we now have it is actually an immense improvement upon the version that came out in _The North American_; yet in finality of expression it cannot vie with the “Lines” associated with Tintern Abbey, not to speak of certain portions of “The Prelude” or “The Excursion” written in the zenith of Wordsworth’s power. Still, “Thanatopsis” was the first great American poem; in its ultimate form it bids fair to please most readers in all ages. The majesty of Thucydides is borrowed in the conception that the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; there is Homeric splendour of epithet in such expressions as the “all-beholding sun.” The “healing sympathy” of nature, of course, is Wordsworthianism pure and simple; but the poem as a whole is tinged with a pantheism much more stoical than the pantheism of Wordsworth, and curiously out of keeping with the touch of New England moralising toward the end. This touch is even more pronounced in the verses “To a Waterfowl.” “To a Waterfowl” was published with several other poems, including “Thanatopsis,” in 1821. According to that wayward genius Hartley Coleridge, it is the best short poem in the English language; a perilously sweeping judgment, like Shelley’s on “France,” the magnificent ode by Hartley’s father. At all events, “To a Waterfowl” is hardly surpassed by any of Bryant’s later work, and probably unsurpassed by anything of comparable subject and scope ever written in America.