We are thankful for the ideals voiced in _The Poet_ (1863), and we listen respectfully to _The Flood of Years_ (1876), as the final utterance of a poet who has had the experience of fourscore years. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Bryant is the first great American poet. His poetry is chiefly reflective and descriptive, and it is remarkable for its elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. He lacks dramatic power and skill in narration. Calmness and restraint, the lack of emotional intensity, are also evident in his greatest work. His depths of space are vast, but windless. In _The Poet_ he says that verse should embody:-- "... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the windless deep." His chosen field is describing and interpreting nature. He has been called an American Wordsworth. In the following lines Bryant gives poetic expression to his feeling that a certain maiden's heart and face reflected the beauty of the natural scenes amid which she was reared:-- "... all the beauty of the place Is in thy heart and on thy face. The twilight of the trees and rocks Is in the light shade of thy locks." [Footnote: "O Fairest of the Rural Maids." (1820.)] With these lines compare Wordsworth's _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_ (1799):-- "... she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face." Bryant himself says that under the influence of Wordsworth, nature suddenly changed "into a strange freshness and life." It is no discredit to him to have been Wordsworth's pupil or to have failed to equal the magic of England's greatest poet of nature. Bryant's range was narrow for a great poet, and his later verse usually repeated his earlier successes. As a rule, he presented the sky, forest, flower, stream, animal, and the composite landscape, only as they served to illumine the eternal verities, and the one verity toward which nature most frequently pointed was death. His heart, unlike Wordsworth's, did not dance with the daffodils waving in the breeze, for the mere pleasure of the dancing. The blank verse of his _Thanatopsis_ has not been surpassed since Milton. In everything that he did, Bryant was a careful workman. Painters have noticed his skill in the use of his poetic canvas and his power to suggest subjects to them, such as:-- "... croft and garden and orchard, That bask in the mellow light." Three vistas from _To a Waterfowl_,--"the plashy brink of weedy lake," "marge of river wide," and "the chafed ocean side,"--long ago furnished the suggestion for three paintings.