What lightness of touch Bryant had is shown in that exquisite lyric ‘The Stream of Life.’ He could be conventional, as in the love poem where he celebrates ‘the gentle season’ when ‘nymphs relent,’ and very sensibly advises the young lady ’ere her bloom is past, to secure her lover.’ He was not strong in wit or humor. The verses ‘To a Mosquito’ might have been read with good effect to a party of well-fed clubmen after dinner, but finding them in the same volume with ‘A Forest Hymn’ gives one an uncomfortable surprise, like finding a pun in Lowell’s _Cathedral_. That Bryant could write agreeable narrative verse, ‘The Children of the Snow’ and ‘Sella’ bear witness. That he is at his best in meditative poems, lofty characterizations of Nature, grand visions of Life and Death, is proved by hundreds of felicitous verses which have become an inalienable part of our young literature. He never really excelled the work of his youth. Bryant will always be known as the author of ‘Thanatopsis.’ This great vision of Death is his stateliest poem and his best, the most felicitous of phrase and the loftiest in imagery. Written by a stoic, magnificently stoical in tone, it offers but a stoic’s comfort after all. Perhaps this is a secret of its popularity, on the theory that while professed pagans are few the instinct towards paganism still exists, and most among those who say least about it. V LATEST POETICAL WORK _THE ILIAD_ AND _THE ODYSSEY_ The collected edition of Bryant’s poems of 1854 contains a handful of translations, twelve from the Spanish, four from the German, one each from the French, the Provençal, the Portuguese, and the Greek. In 1864 a translation of the fifth book of the _Odyssey_ was printed in the volume entitled _Thirty Poems_. The praise which it called out gave Bryant the impulse to further experiments of the same sort; and after the death of his wife (in 1866), when the necessity was upon him of forgetting his grief so far as possible in some engrossing work, he undertook a version of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ entire. He gave himself methodically to the task, translating about forty lines a day. Later he increased the daily stint to seventy-five lines. He chose blank verse because ‘the use of rhyme in a translation is a constant temptation to petty infidelities.’ Bryant retained the misleading Latin forms of proper names. Worsley says: ‘Not even Mr. Gladstone’s example can now make Juno, Mercury, and Venus admissible in Homeric story.’ But Worsley confessed his own inability to write Phoibos, Apollôn, and Kirké. Bryant’s argument for his course looks specious: ‘I was translating from Greek into English, and I therefore translated the names of the gods, as well as the other parts of the poem.’ Probably he had an affection for the old nomenclature, a sentiment like Macaulay’s, who ‘never could reconcile himself to seeing the friends of his boyhood figure as Kleon, and Alkibiadês, and Poseidôn, and Odysseus.’[6]