This means that great poets seem very great and magnificent when we think of them after they are dead and gone, or when they live by themselves at a great distance; but really when you know them, they are as natural and human as children. That perfectly describes William Cullen Bryant. In 1874 Bryant was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy of St. Petersburg. The same year, on his eightieth birthday, he was presented with an address of honor, signed by thousands and thousands of people. This was accompanied by a special vase, completed sometime afterward, which commemorated his literary career. A little later in the same year he visited Governor Tilden at Albany, and was tendered a public reception. After that some of his friends proposed that he should be nominated as one of the electors on the Tilden electoral ticket, when Tilden was a candidate for the presidency of the United States. These and many other public honors were heaped upon him in his old age. When over eighty-three years of age he was invited to deliver an address on the unveiling of a statue of Mazzini, the Italian patriot, in Central Park, New York City. After it was over, he was very much exhausted, but walked across the park to the house of a friend. On the steps he fell, being old and feeble and very tired. His head hit on a stone and he fainted away. Less than two weeks later, June 12, 1878, he died from the effects of this fall. CHAPTER XIII LEARNING TO LOVE A POET It is not uncommon to hear young people say, “I don’t like poetry at all. It is dry, horrid stuff, and I don’t understand it.” No doubt some of you will say or think this about Bryant’s poetry. It is true that he used a great many long, hard words; and his poems are sometimes rather solemn. What is more, they are not musical like Longfellow’s. It is said that Bryant had no ear for music. For this reason you cannot read his poetry as you do Longfellow’s, swinging along from line to line. Young people who read in the sing-song style will find that they cannot do that when they come to Bryant. At first you may think his poetry is, for this reason, not good poetry at all. Perhaps it would be better to call Bryant a prose poet instead of a musical poet. But when you get used to his prose-like poetry, you will like it if you have in you the least love of nature or natural beauty. Take some one poem that you like and read it over and over again, until you have it almost if not quite by heart—for instance, that beautiful poem, “The Death of the Flowers,” written on the occasion of his sister’s death: The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.