Yet let no empty gust Of passion find an utterance in thy lay, A blast that whirls the dust Along the howling street and dies away; But feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the windless deep. This is flat contradiction of the idea that entirely self-conscious and self-controlled art can avail to move the reader. Bryant pleads for deepest feeling in exercise of the poetic function; it is more than important, it is indispensable. Of that striking poem ‘The Tides,’ he said ‘it was written with a certain awe upon me which made me hope that there might be something in it.’ The poem proved to be one of Bryant’s noblest conceptions. Yet a lady of ‘judgment’ told one of Bryant’s friends, who of course told him, that she did not think there was much in it. Nature appeals to Bryant in her broad and massive aspects. ‘The Prairies’ is an illustration. Gazing on the ‘encircling vastness’ for the first time, the heart swells and the eye dilates in an effort to comprehend it:-- Lo! they stretch, In airy undulations, far away, As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, And motionless forever. As the poet looks abroad over the vast and glowing fields, there sweeps by him a vision of the races that have peopled these solitudes and perished to make room for races to come. It is magnificent even if it is not scientific. In the sense it gives of the spaciousness of the prairies with the myriad sounds of life projected on the great elemental silence, it is a true American poem. ‘A Hymn of the Sea’ is another illustration of that largeness of view characteristic of Bryant. Each thought is lofty and far-reaching. The cloud that rises from the ‘realm of rain’ shadows whole countries, the tornado wrecks a fleet, whirling the vast hulks ‘like chaff upon the waves:’-- These restless surges eat away the shores Of earth’s old continents; the fertile plain Welters in shallows, headlands crumble down, And the tide drifts the sea-sand in the streets Of the drowned city. He conveys the idea not only of spaciousness but of endless duration in the lines describing the coral worm laying his ‘mighty reefs,’ toiling from ‘age to age’ until His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check The long wave rolling from the southern pole To break upon Japan. Certain lines in ‘A Forest Hymn’ are also remarkable for the sense they give of vast reaches of time, stretching not forward but backward into eternity:-- These lofty trees Wave not less proudly that their ancestors Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost One of earth’s charms: upon her bosom yet, After the flight of untold centuries, The freshness of her far beginning lies And yet shall lie.