"... The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,--the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods--rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man." _Thanatopsis_ shows the old Puritan tendency to brood on death, but the _Inscription for Entrance to a Wood_, written in 1815 and published in the same number of _The North American Review_ as his first great poem, takes us where "... the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds." The gladness of the soft winds, the blue sky, the rivulet, the mossy rocks, the cleft-born wild-flower, the squirrels, and the insects,--all focus our attention on the "deep content" to be found in "the haunts of Nature," and suggest Wordsworth's philosophy of the conscious enjoyment of the flower, the grass, the mountains, the bird, and the stream, voicing their "thousand blended notes." We may say of Bryant what was true of Cooper, that when he enters a forest, power seems to come unbidden to his pen. Bryant's _Forest Hymn_ (1825) finds God in those green temples:-- "Thou art in the soft winds That run along the summit of these trees In music." He points out the divinity that shapes our ends in:-- "That delicate forest flower, With scented breath and look so like a smile." No Puritan up to this time had represented God in a guise more pleasing than the smile of a forest flower. This entire _Hymn_ seems like a great prayer rooted deep in those earlier prayers to which the boy used to listen. Although Bryant lived to be eighty-four, he wrote less poetry than Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, and about one third as much as Shelley, who was scarcely thirty when he was drowned. It is not length of days that makes a poet. Had Bryant died in his thirtieth year, his excellence and limitations would be fairly well shown in his work finished at that time. At this age, in addition to the five poems in his 1821 volume (p. 139), he had written _The Winter Piece_, _A Forest Hymn_, and _The Death of the Flowers_. These and a number of other poems, written before he had finished his thirtieth year, would have entitled him to approximately the same rank that he now holds in the history of American poetry. It is true that if he had then passed away, we should have missed his exquisite call to _The Evening Wind_ (1829), and some of his other fine productions, such as _To the Fringed Gentian_ (1829), _The Prairies_ (1832), _The Battle-Field_ (1837), with its lines which are a keynote to Bryant's thought and action:-- "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, Th' eternal years of God are hers."